Verizon, my new apartment, and the dead phone saga.

The BBQ Pit
1

I moved into a new apartment on Saturday. No real problems. Monday I bought a corded phone and tried the four jacks with it:

Living Room: Dial tone.
Kitchen: Dial tone.
Office (aka smaller bedroom): Dead line.
Bedroom: Dead line.

Mmmkay. I’ll just place a work order with my apartment. What’s that they say? They only guarantee so far as to have working phone service. And I do. But it’s not in the ONE JACK I really need it. To get the other two lines active, probably because they’re wired differently, I need to call Verizon and pay activation fees. In other words, the apartment shirks any responsibility that two of the four phone lines should be active.

I call Verizon. What the heck, I need to set up a second voice line anyway, since the office phone (eventually) will have a fax machine always on for work and is therefore pretty useless for incoming voice. I tell them my problem. The guy is (to Verizon’s credit) helpful. He tells me that it is quite easy to get all the jacks on the main line - if indeed the problem is that the two dead jacks are dead because they were wired differently for a second line. I opened all four jacks at the guy’s insistence (I’d already opened one before ever making any phone calls). And they are all THE EXACT FUCKING SAME WIRING. Though I did learn that the bedroom jack is daisychained off the Office jack, explaining why the bedroom is dead along with the office. The office wiring seems to run in the direction of the main box in the kitchen.

The office will have my fax machine, as well as the DSL modem. It needs to have a live line, and as soon as possible. I have work that requires the connection. No connection = productivity standstill for my job. I’m getting a second number activated on the sixth; I am assured this will make the two that are currently dead suddenly active. I preemptively call bullshit. Unfortunately, because I can’t prove it until they fail on the sixth, I can’t complain about it until after the sixth.

The second phone line MIGHT be active by the sixth, but I doubt it. The DSL won’t be active until as late as the sixteenth, and even then, it sounds like that will be very inconveniently in my living room, completely away from my computer in the office.

So fuck you to my new apartment complex. You are setting a great early precedent in saying that problems in your apartments are not your problems.

Fuck you to Verizon, which I called four different times attempting to find out whether it truly is their responsibility or the apartment’s. They seem to say the apartment’s, but they’re willing to make it their problem for a nice little repair fee.

Oh, and fuck you to the original contractor who wired up the apartment once upon a time. The office really needs to be isolated from all three other jacks (and who knows if that’s even hooked up to the box in the first place?), but because you got lazy and just wired the bedroom to ride off the office, that’s not going to happen.

2

Seems to me you should be able to run Line 1 in the bedroom while running line 2 in the office - they’re two different sets of wire pairs, so with a properly wired jack there’s no reason why it shouldn’t work.

3

Shit, there’s only four wires inside that phone cable. Do it yourself.

4

The “fuck you” should go to the apartment managers and the contractors they hired to do the wiring, since Verizon is not responsible for inside wire.

5

Upon further reflection, I should probably clarify my post a little bit.

I have no way of knowing how your apartment is wired, but the demark is generally a dedicated phone closet and the risers are owned by the landlord. I have also occasionally seen a bunch of NIDs strung out on the side of older buildings.

Either way, once you’re past the demark you’re off the PSTN and out of Verizon’s hands.

6

First, get a 50’ telephone extension wire from Radio Shack.

Second, the telephone guy can put all your phones on the same connection, but then you’re completely limited to 2 lines, and your second line needs a special splitter to work. The way it’s set up now, the 2nd line is set up on those outlets using the same wires that line 1 usually uses, that’s easier to deal with.

Two lines on one set of wires is perfect for a 2 line phone, but more difficult when you’re trying to just connect a fax or modem to the second line.

7

Perhaps there was something irregular about my setup, but when I had two lines running into my home, and wanted one jack to be dedicated to the second line, I just lifted out the wires for the first line, and it was fine.

8

ISTR that Line 1 uses the interior two wires of your modular jack, and Line 2 uses the outer two. If you have both lines on one cable, and want a normal phone to use Line 2, you either have to use a Line1/Line2 splitter or rewire the jack to take the Line 2 wires and attach them to the Line 1 screws.

It’s a perfectly reasonable way to do it, but I don’t think that it’s preferred since you’re taking wires off their normal locations, it’s harder to troubleshoot.

9

Thank you for playing Useless Glib Answer. You win absolutely fucking nothing. If you’d read the OP, you’d see that I unscrewed all the jacks to take a look, and they’re all wired the exact same. If it were a problem at the jacks, I’d see it. I am perfectly ready and willing and able to do it myself, if it were something I could get to. But it’s somewhere in the wall that the Office (and by extension the Bedroom) line is failing me, and ripping up the walls to fix somebody else’s shitty wiring job is a big no-no in rental properties.

Exgineer, after further consultation all around this morning, I see you are perfectly right. Verizon stops at the outside box, and it’s been their policy forever. So in that way, they certainly don’t deserve a “fuck you” for my current troubles. Of course, if I cave and call out a repair tech from Verizon to make the inside wiring their problem for a hefty fee (at least $95 for simple wiring change in one jack, which is something I could do myself. Anything that I can’t do - and it looks more and more like this job is something I can’t do - will be even more), then I can rant and rave about their prices all I want, whether it’s justified or not.

I hold firmly by fucking my apartment management because, according to them, I have at least one line (out of four. Yeah, real tough) working, and that’s all they are obligated to be responsible for. The lease, unfortunately, also reads along those lines.

Cheesesteak, already have a 50’ cable that I needed for perfectly legitimate reasons in my previous residence. Looks like I’m going to be running out to the Home Despot for wall-tacks to string that sucker up from the living room to the office. I just wanted a little, y’know, aesthetic; wires stapled into all the ceilings do not qualify there.

I guess the moral of the story is that I shouldn’t expect things to not suck until I actually buy a place instead of rent, and I can do everything myself.

10

It’s not so much a matter of corporate policy as it is an artifact of the '96 Telecom Act. Blame Congress and the FCC for forcing Verizon to wash their hands of you and your problems. Not that Verizon is a pack of sweethearts.

You can add inside wire service to your Verizon contract and they’ll come out and do repairs for you, but in your case I think that might require some sort of thre-way negotiation with property management. Given how few problems people usually have with CPE I usually recommend against it anyway. The monthly fee is just this side of ridiculous for a service you may only need once.

11

One of the twenty or so phone representatives I talked to in a 24 hour period brought up the service. It doesn’t count for preexisting problems. And this is certainly now on the records as a preexisting problem.

12

Dwellings that have daisy-chained wiring usually have it all the way thru. And it’s unusual to have more than 1 line per apartment. And all 4 outlets wired exactly the same probably confirms this.

So your single phone line probably goes: Living Room, Kitchen, Office, Bedroom.

Therefore you might check at the last working outlet (your Kitchen) and see if the wires leading to the next outlets are connected properly. If you can, touch a probe to the wires after they come off the connection and see if they have a dial tone. I’ve often found the problem at this point in wiring. If it’s there, it’s an easy fix for you, and you’ve aved yourself some money.

Also, if your apartment is really modern enough to be wired for 2 lines, there is a point (the main phone box in the kitchen?) where both lines are available. Simply switch the wires there, and see if the Office & Bedroom connections are now live. If so, you know the wiring is OK and that there aren’t any broken wires in your walls, etc. Good! And you can temporarily connect both the wire going to the Office-Bedroom and the wire going to the Kitchen-Living room to the same incoming phone line, the one with a dial tone. Then you will have all your connections working, though only on a single phone line. When the 2nd phone line is turned on (you can tell by testing for a second incoming line with a dial tone) you will have to undo this, and switch whichever set of outlets you want onto the new second line.

13

Some of us are sweethearts.

Even though I work in hicap data, we have the same limitations. Outside technicians can be held liable for damages (including loss of data) if they touch anything past the demarc.

Just FYI.