This time it's at least possible that Verizon is not to blame; both my wife and I are leaning in the charitable direction at this moment … although the conspiracy-minded among you may think otherwise.
In either case, my family didn't get to watch the Red Sox last night, I didn't get my customary early-morning jump on blogging today, and my wife, Julie, had to do the always-annoying wait-for-the-serviceman thing (after cancelling a hair appointment).
These disruptions have happened so frequently of late -- this is at least our fifth major FiOS outage since mid-March -- the details no longer matter. All I know for certain is that our TV, telephone and Internet services went dark yesterday afternoon (is that what they mean by triple play?) and only returned about 2:30 today after visits from two different Verizon techs.
At least the first one spotted the cut cable and the second one did the necessary splicing, which I'll get to in more detail in a moment. (Although I have no idea why the first one couldn't do both jobs.)
Now, I've been accused by a Verizon exec of wanting to "take down" the company, and by a reader of harboring a vendetta -- actually, "Can you spell VANDATTA???" was the verbatim charge. Neither is true, and while I will cop to knowing a human-interest/misery story when I experience one, at this point I'd just as soon be denied any more fresh material if it means my 6-year-old son, Grant, will be able to watch Game 2 of the Red Sox/Angels series tomorrow night.
I'm also aware -- oh, am I aware -- that my family is by no means the only to experience FiOS-related distress. I've written about the fires, and the smoke, and the busted gas lines, and even the sewage so often in recent months that I can't really blame my colleagues for joshing about retribution or that reader for wondering if I might have a "vandatta."
I really don't. It's just that stuff keeps happening.
Like two days ago. Have I mentioned the smoke and flames -- maybe they were just sparks -- from the pole across the street? Definitely not Verizon that time. On Tuesday afternoon, Julie called me at the office to report that an Nstar electric company worker in a cherry picker had somehow done something or other that produced a visible plume of smoke. Our daughter, Emma, said she saw flames, too, although she's only 6 so it's possible she mistook sparks for flames … but again with the details. Anyway, Julie suspected we might be in for some electrical problems, but Tuesday passed into Wednesday morning uneventfully.
Wednesday afternoon we get the FiOS triple play. Might there be some relationship between the Nstar plume and the Verizon cable cut? New homes are being built in our neighborhood and there are enough utility and construction trucks driving about -- both Nstar and Verizon were around Wednesday -- to make any scenario you'd like to imagine possible.
What we know for certain is that someone or something cut the Verizon cable that feeds into our house -- and only our house, apparently -- at cherry-picker height between two poles, realized what had happened (we're presuming it was unintentional -- honestly), coiled the flapping ends and taped them to their respective poles.
Then Josh Beckett shut out the Angels on four hits while I heard only bits and pieces between the static on AM radio.
Julie says the Verizon guys did a good job putting things back in order today.
And we're not bitter.
Just sick of it all.
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verizon fios
get tw cable triple play 90.00 just as good no contract
stop putting all your eggs in 1 basket
seriously you didn't contemplate this being an issue? especially with a company like VERIZON?
keep crying like some emo teenager on what appears to be your very public live journal blog though.
You're out of your mind if
You're out of your mind if you think TW Cable is just as good. I've got TW Cable and I pay the extra $10/month for the fast Roadrunner Plus service. With this I get 8mbps down/512kbs up. My dad, who has Fios gets 20mbps down and up!!! I cry everytime I hear about his amazing speeds.
FIOS vs Comcast
You can always migrate to Comcast, then wonder which services they'll block for you this month . . . BitTorrent, Lotus Notes, Gnutella.... and deny it all day long ! ! !
I'm a little bummed actually, I was hoping FIOS might be my path away from Comcast's frustrations.
Verizon commitment
I'll tell you up front - YES I work for a cable company. YES, here on Long Island in NY Verizon is deploying FiOS.
My personal belief is that competition is always good for the consumer - so god bless FiOS. Here is the rub that will always make FiOS 2nd Rate to (most) cable companies.
Union Mentality!
Why didn't the 1st guy fix it? It's not his job. He would have been reprimanded by his management and co-workers for doing a function he isn't paid for. Although I am no longer in the field - there is 1 theme in our Field Service: the Customer is our most important commodity. Do we have moron service people? Probably.
Talk to any “former” telephone employee. They’ll tell you the truth. They have an install to do, and there are no available “pairs” in the box. What do they do? Cut one – leave THEM without telephone so they can complete their install. What happens when your phone goes suddenly dead, and you see they guy at the pole. He will tell you that he can’t trouble shoot your problem without a work order and leave you. Then when you DO get a service call – the next guy will do the same thing to another customer.
Stick with cable. It’s always a better service!
Give Verizon a little credit for a gutsy decision to do FTTH
So maybe it's time for a positive FiOS story:
I'm no lover of Verizon. I just cancelled my Verizon wireless service for incompetence and obscene charges for wireless data compared to the competition. But over the years the reliability of my Comcast cable service hasn't been anything to write home about either. Comcast's DNS service has been so unreliable I've had to hard code non-Comcast DNS servers in my routers (search for "comcast dns problems" in Google if you don't believe me!)
However, one does need to give Verizon credit (especially when contrasted with other RBOCs) for having the long term vision to pull fiber to the home (against the wishes of Wall Street for quick returns) and in my view reward them for once taking a long term view of customer needs. Estimates I've read is that even with good uptake rates they're looking at a 10+ year ROI for FiOS. Not something you see from public companies very often these days.
Anyway, my conversion from cable to FiOS was painless. They showed up on time, and in fact came out several days in advance of the promised install date to do a site survey so they had everything they needed on install date. They put the stuff exactly where I wanted it (and neatly), went through the extra effort of getting a pull wire through existing conduit so they didn't have to rip anything up, didn't give me any argument when I said I wanted to configure the router the way I wanted it (they simply gave me the router in the box so I could set it up), and were totally professional. A supervisor actually showed up during the install to make sure that I was happy with the way the install was being done.
I compare this to a very surly Comcast guy who recently did a HDTV cable box upgrade and gave me nothing but grief when I said I wanted a box with HDMI output (in fact on the phone they said it was impossible to actually request that the box I ordered had HDMI, the could only list the request in the comments section of the order).
It's been up for a month now w/o incident, performance is everything I expected it to be (Speakeasy shows me 21 mb/4.9 mb every time I run it, independent of time of day) and the recent announcement that they will offer a 20/20 megabit offering momentarily for a small relatively small price increment is something cable will never be able to offer given cable's fiber to only the neighborhood architecture. I just wish they would price the 50 megabit offering at a more reasonable increment to the 20 megabit offering (if anyone at Verizon is listening, I think you'd find a lot of uptake at a 30-50% cost premium instead of a 150% premium and make a lot more money in total!)
So in spite of the the traditional phone company mentality of fighting every new technology, in this case Verizon has done the right things by doing FTTH. I have friends in Bell South territory wishing they had an RBOC like Verizon instead of one looking to do broadband on the cheap.
Verizon is anything but perfect (I'm against giving any vendor my triple play on the principle that competition is in my long term interest, although I'm so pissed at Comcast's constant price increases for cable service that I'm likely to switch to FiOS TV when it becomes available simply to punish Comcast). But on this one Verizon is doing the right thing in the customer's and even the Country's interest by doing FTTH that it deserves some slack and even credit.
FIOS Out Article
I have had Verizon FIOS for over a year now (Since March 2005) and never had an outage as far as I know. I use Vonage (over the FIOS) and did have problems with them in the past but that seems to have cleared up. I have vonage plugged in to a UPS so I have even had fios and phone service during a power outage. I even had the opportunity to test 911 when two stolen pick up trucks were abandoned in my driveway during the night and left on blocks taken from my neighbor's house.
The house was built in 1975 and there has been new construction less than a mile away (on land around a water tower they removed.. I know I have never heard of a water tower going away either). Before getting FIOS I had Cable Modem for a while. The internet was great and zero problems with Vonage but the TV service was far poorer quality than the roof antenna and not worth the price so I use roof antenna and AppleTV nowadays. Only problem is 1/3 of the channels are in Spanish... what a waste.
Cables in my neighborhood are all underground so use of poles sounds like part of your problem.
My experience with cable companies has been dismal. In Boise I was given a box that didn't fully function by AT&T cable in my apartment so I went with DirecTV when I bought a house and lived with no local channels and no network TV for two years. My homeowners association didn't allow roof antennas and direct TV doesn't offer local channels in Boise but must block the networks.... stupid. Scottsdale had Cox. Their service quality was fine but they wouldn't accept the fact that they were the provider for my area because somehow my address was in their computer wrong. I eventually had to use an incorrect address to get billing set up (and thus internet service). The sad thing was cable TV was already on in my condo the entire time. For Cox I had a local installer tell me they didn't service my address, someone on the phone, someone in a storefront, I got the message myself when I went to a coffee shop to sign up through their web site. I finally got it by selecting a permutation of my address when after typing my entire address in it still asked " which one do you want" The crazy thing was with their system. It said I could sign up for phone service (over cable) but not internet. They even admitted that was screwy but could never transfer me to someone who knew what to do about it. If I hadn't figured it out on my own I wouldn't have had broadband at all. After the experience of having broadband in palo alto in the late 90's and then loosing it in Boise I wasn't about to give up in Arizona in 2004.
Good Luck,
Gordon
(By the way I'm an Electrical Engineer and I design computer chips. I have worked for Hewlett Packard, and Amkor, and now a tiny "mom and pop" design company in Lewisville, TX. I once did a summer internship with AT&T Bell Labs in Holmdel, NJ (the part that later became Lucent Technologies). I also worked for the part of HP that became Agilent Technologies. Then the part of Amkor that became Dongbu (Korean).
Anyway, bottom line is I have had outages with AT&T cable, Cox Cable, Comcast, and other's I had during college and even DirecTV due to weather. I have yet to have a signal loss with FIOS. I don't have their TV service however so perhaps it just isn't as obvious.
good verizon experience.
I've had Verizon FiOS for over a year now and have only ever had a noticeable outage once. Noticeable as in happening during hours i actually was trying to use the connection. On Christmas day 2 years ago we had a power outage and when power resumed, I had no internet. I don't know if their support was open on Christmas day. Next morning I got a support person almost immediately when I called. The guy was one of the usual non-technical people and decided base on my answers my walljack was broken... I eventually convinced him that a power outage or surge was not going to just damage the cable or walljack between 2 pieces of equipment without also damaging those pieces of equipment.
He contacted a real tech who immediately saw that the box on the side of our house was not responding, forced it to reset, and everything was back to working after that. In all the call took about 15 minutes I'd say, and after that no problems. There's been multiple power outages since then, usually much like the one that caused the problem where they only last a few minutes at most, and none of those have caused problems. Our neighborhood also uses telephone poles, but not much construction so they're not touched much except the yearly tree pruning.
My experience with cable was much worse, there were regular outages, usually only a couple minutes long but during the hours I actually use the connection. Since we still get our TV from cable, I've noticed there are still regular outages of that. It partially seems dependent on weather. Rain and especially thunder storms increase the chance the cable will go out.
I actually have my router check the connection every minute, and record if it is down. It has recorded a few 2-3 minute outages often in the 3-5am time range I'm not using the service. And this one recurring outage in march that lasts a few hours. It's happened 2 years in a row, so I'm thinking this is some sort of scheduled maintenance.