Seven things users want from Verizon

"When it comes to the last mile, Verizon is the Big Kahuna. I'd just like to see them recognize that there is some competition in the marketplace."
-- Paul Ladd, director of MIS, Suffolk University

Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg has focused on expansion since 1996, when as CEO of Nynex he hammered out a merger with Bell Atlantic. His latest expansion plan is to continue winning long-distance approval in states where Verizon is the incumbent local provider. But before Seidenberg and Verizon set their sights on becoming a national player in the U.S. long-distance market, users polled by Network World say there are plenty of things on the local side that Verizon needs to do.

Come up with a better trouble- ticket process.

"We constantly have problems with Verizon being a no-show when we have lines down. (Verizon is dispatched by Sprint, which is the long-distance and data provider in this case.) Then Verizon closes the ticket and we have to start the process all over again," says Paul Lourd, director of IT for UST, a Greenwich, Conn., holding company for several tobacco and wine subsidiaries. The only service Lourd uses Verizon for is local voice and, based on his experience with Verizon's service, he doubts he'd consider using the provider for anything else.

Gian Zoppo, CIO for marketing outfit Porter Novelli International's U.S. region, says he'd like to see Verizon and other providers work on putting together service teams that could handle business customer calls from start to finish. To resolve a trouble ticket now, a customer has to usually call at least a local provider and long-distance provider and handle the coordination between the two.

"The promise of deregulation was that you'd get better pricing and more services," he says. "The reality is that it takes so much time to coordinate the vendors that any savings you get are likely consumed by the extra people you need to handle the tasks."

Offer competitive pricing.

"When it comes to the last mile, Verizon is the Big Kahuna. I'd just like to see them recognize that there is some competition in the marketplace," says Paul Ladd, director of MIS for Suffolk University in Boston. "When we talked to Verizon about a transparent LAN service, the price was way too high," he says. "Yipes [which Ladd selected for the service] gave us three times as much bandwidth at half the cost." (Note: Yipes Communications filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in March).

Better business DSL services.

"I'd like to see Verizon offer more in the way of broadband services that can be customized to the user's needs," says William Horst, assistant regional administrator for the Government Services Administration (GSA) in Boston. "Verizon is sitting on its residential asymmetrical DSL offerings instead of adding any symmetrical DSL services for business. Their deployment seems to ignore the need for speeds beyond 768K bit/sec to support remote business offices using pricey digital data services."

Improve data-circuit implementation times.

Millipore, a Medford, Mass., bioscience company, is in the process of installing fiber to three Massachusetts sites, so it no longer has to deal with Verizon. "They have a tremendous data-line backlog," says Ram Prabhu, director of corporate telecommunications. Millipore has several international sites that are connected to the company's headquarters through dedicated lines. Verizon is responsible for installing the last-mile local loop on those lines. In the past, Verizon would have the local loop installed before the international circuit was up. "That changed in 2000," Prabhu says. Now the local loop is always the last part of the line to be finished.

Offer number portability between central offices.

Eastern Bank, a Boston financial institution, uses Verizon for its corporate headquarters and all 46 of its branches. Within the next few months, Eastern plans to move one office to a larger facility, located closer to the corporate headquarters. The office will now be served out of a new central office. Verizon has offered to forward the office's existing Centrex numbers from the old central office to the new numbers that will be assigned to the office at the new central office, but there is a recurring charge for this service, says Robert Primavera, an assistant vice president at Eastern. Primavera finds it odd that carriers can handle number portability if someone switches providers but not if a customer moves from one central office to another.

Porter Novelli's Zoppo says this is a service he'd also like to see. Porter Novelli, based in Manhattan, lost voice services on Sept. 11, because the company was served out of a central office located in the World Trade Center. Voice service was restored quickly, but Zoppo says the firm could not immediately get service through its original numbers - something that might have been possible if the numbers could have been moved to another central office.

Innovate.

"It's tough getting them to do anything outside the box. . . . There's not a lot of ingenuity there," says Laurence Cranwell, a senior vice president at managed service provider AimNet Solutions of Norwalk, Conn. (However, he notes that Verizon recently has responded to AimNet's specific need for SONET technology, whereas others could not).

The GSA's Horst concurs, noting that he'd like to see Verizon come out with some kind of voice over IP through Centrex offering.

Improve support levels in general.

"Their support level has really deteriorated over the last several years," says Bob Andrews, director of worldwide communications for Waters Corp., a Milford, Mass., testing equipment manufacturer. Waters has migrated several intrastate long-distance lines over to AT&T and Focal Communications because the company isn't satisfied with what Verizon has offered. "Verizon just doesn't seem to care if they compete with these guys," Andrews says.