Whats the Deal with FiOS?
In all of the articles that Frank and I intend to write, we have missed very few. I recently missed one for a really silly reason. It was my night to write and my internet was down. It wasn’t just down, it was kaput. Thats the first time I have ever typed the word “kaput” and am not even sure if I am spelling it right. (Yup. I checked.)
So the point of all this is let our readers know of one service provider: Verizon. More specifically, Verizon FiOS. Last Monday I took of work to assist in the overseeing of the installation and to be available to let the technician get to where he needed to. All seemed well, until the technician left in a rush and didn’t return for several hours. That’s not even what I am upset about…We barely had the service for a day when it went down and no amount of calling tech support helped. There was simply no way for anything to be done, no remote resetting, no hardware checks, we couldn’t even cancel it right then and there.
Who does that? Who completely denies a customer like that? And then offers absolutely no compensation for the lost time I should have been spending working with other colleagues at my apartment for an extraneous business project? Verizon cost me time and money that I am never going to get back and they say “nothing” about it? (On a side note, the fiber that runs to your apartment building or neighbor hood only goes that far…its not standard to get the termination point in your actual home, but must be connected to via DSL, Boooo.)
You can imagine the lava-hot rage I had. As you may have noticed, I am back but only because they rushed a tech over during the day to fix whatever was wrong at the fiber termination point. Lucky for them it is back now. Lucky for them the speed and bandwidth is completely ridiculous.
If it happens again, I am going to completely swallow my pride and go with another service, but I am still expecting something for this. Its one thing to save money and scrimp on service, but its another to promise something and then not provide. Verizon, you disappointed us.
On a later note, we should mention that we eventually did get a good technician to fix everything that the dummy put in on Monday. Its also a bit of our landlord as well who advertised this service and has crummy lines in place. I mean this building is only 3 years old, should there be at least two network cables to every room by now?
In the mean time, please feel free to drool over our connection speeds. Email me a screen shot of yours from Speakeasy.net and we will post it if ya got somethin’ worth writin’ home about. 
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Comments
@Will: Thanks for clarifying, I should have been more explicit. And yes the through put is nice, how is it where you are?
Hmm, makes me feel good that they don’t have Fios where I live yet. I inquired about it too. We went with a cable connection instead. I’ll have to try the speed test when I get home. Thanks!
yea, that’s pretty poor customer service for sure. But, you got what you were looking for!
You still got me by a few kbps - 
Let’s see if your comment section takes images:
http://myinvestingblog.com/MIBimages/mib%20speakeasy.JPG
Hm - apparently it didn’t like my image post, or maybe I live in quarantine now - but in case it did neither, I said it’s a pain that you got such crappy customer service from them but good that you got in! My speed is HERE, and you’ve got my by a few kbps.
@FFB: Now that some time has passed, I feel a bit better about the whole thing now. They really went out of their way to help us out and gave us some good direction on getting our land lord to rewire the place. Supposedly the data transfer does not discriminate from video on demand and your internet connection so it jumps close to 30 when you have on demand and I am curious to try it.
@hank: Nah your not in quarantine, I think the comments don’t allow for it…one more thing on my list of things to fix! You put up some good numbers though!
Just to clarify, Verizon does typically run fiber to the dwelling in the case of a single family home, however, in an apartment scenario they generally run FIOS to the phone closet for the building and then break out the fiber into VDSL (Very High Speed DSL) service to be able to distribute it to the individual residences via POTS. So while it is DSL coming into your apartment, its leaps and bounds beyond standard DSL. Sounds like in your situation the phone lines would be the issue, doesn’t look to be affecting the throughput though! Nice.