Tales From The Ipe!

I may start one of those counters similar to those on construction sites recording how many days since the last workplace accident, except tracking outages.

We’re officially at “2 days since our last Verizon outage.”  🙂

When the service is working, I’m happy with it.  Tonight, there was a notification on my PS3 that there was an 80 Mb patch available for download and to install for my LittleBigPlanet game. The PS3 downloaded the 80 Mb file in 60 seconds.  Incredible.

Color me bitter and disenchanted.

I’m going to recap my troubles with FiOS.

1. On June 29th, FiOS installer shows up @ 1pm for an 8am-12pm install window.
2. Junction box is filled with water, and fiber optic network switch of some sort is filled with water, requiring the entire underground cable to be replaced.
3. On June 30th, FiOS Support has no info on whether the new cable is in place, and the installer never calls me to tell me status.
4. The underground cable they buried is bad, so the tech runs a temporary fiber optic cable above ground until I can get a new cable laid later in the week.
5. I receive a call from Verizon Wednesday informing me that they won’t come until July 13th to bury a new cable.
6. On July 3rd, general outage resulting in no tv, internet, or phone.  Call to FiOS provides no information, except there is an outage.  I hang up after waiting interminablely long time to speak to an agent. Service returns later that night, no explanation provided.
7. On July 7th, I have difficulty connecting to the internet. I check the tv and phone, and find no service and no dialtone. I check the ONT, and FAIL is staring me in the face.  I go outside, and find the fiber optic cable cut and thrown on my frontyard.

At this point, I can assure you that I was livid. Did Verizon come out to do work, and not finish the job or connect me?  My first call to Verizon gets disconnected as we try to reach dispatch, and I call back to get another agent who doesn’t want to contact dispatch.  Instead, I have to wait for a tech to come out tomorrow, and I have to be home. From 1-5pm.

Anger boiling.

With the plan to work from my in-laws’ house in the morning, we had a sneaking suspicion that our community had something to do with it.  Looking at the grass this morning, I wondered, didn’t it look recently mowed? A visit to the community trust office confirmed that the grass was likely mowed on Monday, and they probably inadvertently clipped my cable.

I called Verizon’s FiOS Solution Center (which is just a call center like any other), looking for a permanent solution, such as moving up my cable burial service.  No can do, but don’t worry sir. They have poles and such, and can rig up an aerial setup where the cable is not on the ground.

The Verizon FiOS installer came by around 4pm, and told me no, he does not have any kind of aerial poles or anything.  His solution?  He’ll run the cable on the ground. I told him what about the lawnmower?  He said if it happens again, I can call, and they’ll come out and do it all over again. 

The good news is that he did acknowledge that this does indeed suck.

I think it is safe to say that  hi-speed tv/internet service from the cable and telecom companies is pretty f#cked up. No one knows what they are doing.