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Covad Faked DSL Trouble For Verizon?
An anonymous reader sent us the strangest thing I've read in awhile. It's a Press Release on Verizon's website claiming that Covad employees were pressured into submitting thousands of
fake bug reports, and costed the DSL Provider millions in tech support. 22,000 bug reports and sworn statements by covad employees, it effectively looks like a Denial of Service attack at a corporate level. I have to admit that I find this pretty funny.
submitting thousands of fake bug reports, and costed the DSL Provider
Yes, I hate it when things costed me lots of money, too!
Jesus, Taco, have an adult proofread before you post.
slashdot broke my sig
Possible counterattack would be that any such action could be seen as proof that 'wreckers' are actively working with OSS code- and therefore capable of violating the license agreements and stealing code for proprietary purposes. One of the most important defenses against this has been existing policies at many companies that employees are NOT ALLOWED to look at OSS code for fear of just such accusations.
...if the situation were reversed? Bad acts are not funny. If Verizon had deluged Covad with spam bug reports, you'd be all over them. Face facts, guys, this was wrong. I might not think much of Verizon either, but the place to win these wars is in the marketplace, by providing better products at better prices. I do hope they settle out of court; I'd hate to see a giant judgment sink Covad.
Taking the press release at face value is probably not a good idea either.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Gotta prove something before you can get anything done about it. The offenses would have to get much much worse before anything could be done about them I think. It would just be too hard to build a case against them. They would claim that people make mistakes sometimes and that there's nothing they can do about that. They'll just say that when they find a problem they try to fix it as soon as possible. Just try to prove otherwise. You can't.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
Alright Jon, you can come out now! Why hide behind an almost anonymous username when such rhetoric clearly identifies you as the, one an only, JonKatz! I mean, if it isn't bad enough that you mention corporatism or Corporate Republic 20 times in every article you write, now you are trolling as "real people" who agree with you! Shame!
:-)
"Doubt your doubts and believe your beliefs." -- Switchfoot, Ode to Chin
How exactly would any of the RBOC's know that a trouble report was bogus? Given the level of attention that they give to most trouble calls, particularly when a competitor is involved.
sPh
Is this their way of trying to excuse HORRIBLE service in the first place? Take a look at dslreports.com and tell me all those horror stories are fake.
I ordered a DSL line through Speakeasy (a Covad reseller) on the 25th of May. End result: June 9th, I was up and running. Would have been up 2 days sooner, but Verizon took a couple of days to notify Speakeasy/Covad that their part of the job was done.
I don't consider 2 days unreasonable - especially after reading some of the horror stories at DSLReports.com. If Covad was holding off in order to make Verizon look bad - it didn't do much in this case.
In any case, I've only had to call Covad once (to cancel the "Professional Install" after I'd hooked the filters and modem up myself) - and the reps I spoke to were polite and prompt - within an hour, Speakeasy had been notified (by them) that the line was installed and working, and the "Professional Install" had been cancelled. SInce their tech visit was cancelled, I can't personally speak of their techs competence.
The whole thing was about as quick and painless as I could ask for. I guess I'm one of the lucky ones =)
Of course this is a pretty one-sided article... from Verison's side.
If played the middle man in this type of situation before. You need to get the circuit up for the customer ASAP, and it isn't usually obvious where the problem is. It's been my experience that if a circuit (DSL, T1, Frame-Relay, whatever) doesn't come up, the first thing to do is open a trouble ticket with the telco. Sure it may be routing problem (which would be a provider, ie. Covad problem), but telco's usually take so long to work on trouble tickets, you HAVE to open a ticket up immediately just in case it is a telco problem.
I see this as Verison slapping Covad (who is actually a competitor) with a lawsuit for just doing business. Probably no conspiracy at all.
jf
soon after posting this message my DSL went down. Came back up a few hours later. The Verizon tech guy comes to the door to tell me that they have switched me to a new shelf (a T1 is feeding it and not any other shelves).
It stopped the problem from happening every 10s but it still happens probably once in 30 hops...
I guess calling them for several straight months causes something to be eventually done. I don't know if it is adequate but at least it is something.
I have no respect for Verizon. They have known about overselling their bandwith for months (6) yet they refuse to do anything about it. I have gotten to the point where I just call their billing dept and get my money back. I will NOT accept ping spikes over 1000 every 10s.
Their excuse is that they keep putting people in charge of upgrading the system and nothing gets done (always blame someone else apparently).
Perhaps b/c of all these "false" bug reports they are too bogged down but I doubt that is the case in many areas. I personally cannot wait for Road Runner. I would rather deal w/that (cheaper, faster, and probably less problems) than the 1000+ ping responses and poor tech support.
"Right. Now lis'sen, it's 9 AM I want'cha ta do the 5 Verizon jobs and then meet us at the bar on 10th and 2nd by 11. Hey we're fucking union what're they gonna do; fire us?"
Um. Verizon's broadband engineering staff isn't unionized, unless it just happened. It's one of the things that led to the strike during the BA-GTE merger last year. BA was mostly a union shop except in broadband. GTE's operations, being largely in the midwest, are mostly nonunion and GTE had a nasty history of swooping down on would-be unionizers and downsizing their departments. One result of the strike settlement is that the broadband people get to vote on unionizing and Verizon doesn't ship too many of the operations to GTE facilities in the midwest.
No, Verizon's DSL operation is many things: disorganized, inept, overworked, oversubscribed and unresponsive. But it wasn't a union shop during the period covered in the class-action suit against them.
Now back to you. Are you so nastily antiunion because you sit on a lot of corporate boards and own a lot of stock in companies that stand to lose cheap labor to union drives? Or are you (A) privileged enough to never have to worry about living paycheck to paycheck, or (B) a self-loathing workaholic who likes carrying a beeper 24/7 and never going on vacation?
All it takes is a union supervisor telling his union lackeys that Covad & other non telco companies threaten their jobs and to remember that when they install the lines for COvad to use - I'm sure many would be unusable. You'd be surpised how often stuff like this happens.
In which case, the natural consiquence of those actions is that their employer is sued, forced to pay millions in damages, and either goes out of business altogether or is forced to operate on a shoestring and struggle back into the black over a period of years.
There goes any union pay increases and, quite possibly, all those union jobs altogether. Not fair to the stockholder, or those employees who were conscientious in doing their job, but a natural consiquence of sabataging one's own employer by doing deliberately shoddy work or engaging in outright sabatage.
Any union supervisor with such a narrow view of his economic reality should be fired for his own incompitence, both by his employer and his union rank and file. If this lawsuit accentuates that economic reality, then while I have some sympathy for the stockholders, I find the overall result to be a positive one.
Regardless of whether or not the direction for this came from upper management or some utterly stupid and foolish union boss, the bottom line is that the company is resposible for its employees' actions while on the job, and if those employees are engaging in sabatage, can and should be required to pay appropriate damages.
Frankly, unemployed union memebers who get that way for actions like you describe are, in my humble but very correct opinion, disserving of exactly what they got.
The same goes for the other side, of course. If Covad did submit fake bug reports (rather than submitting actual reports for deliberately shoddy Verizon work), then the natural consiquence of having one's employees engage in such activity will be for Covad to pay through the nose. One can only hope that the judicial system will sort the facts out properly (which, while an iffy proposition, is certainly more likely than getting the truth directly from either corporation or their respective unions).
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
> the fact that it took them a month to come back and fix it was unforgivable
Not that I think much of Verizon (I actually hate them), but perhaps it took them so long to get to you because they were busy following up on the other 199 tickets that Covad issued (yours and one other being the only true problem).
From the Verizon declarations of Covad employees:
"At one point, I prepared a summary [of trouble tickets that showed] only approximately 2 of the 200 tickets involved genuine ILEC problems."
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
How come people seem to be suprised that an ILEC is trying to shoot down a competitor by whatever means necessary? They were required to open up their offices for outside companies to come in and hook up DSLAMs. If your boss told you one day that your competitors were going to be renting office space from your company whilst trying to undecut you. Yeah that's going to go over really well. I think reality is finally catching up with the DSL. Growth was rampant as long as companies could fudge numbers and only keep books with a 3 year outlook. Now the DSL .coms have to live with the reality of ILEC, a very unprofitable reality. The ones holding the lines (pun intended) at the end will be the winners while everyone else, including customers, will be the losers.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
So how do Verizon Employees stack up against /. editors?
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"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
One thing to keep in mind in fights like these, as pathetic as they are, is that companies are groups of people (and groups, of groups), not monolithic lockstep entities.
How much of this lawsuit (and the other lawsuits in this miess) are really representative of the companies/for the good of the companies/whatever? How much are some executive seeing dollar signs, some unhappy middle-manager seeking revenge, some group with lousy data making a stupid decision, a paranoid marketing manager, etc.
Of course this and related actions seem stupid because they are. The average company has all the grace and finesse of a drunken elephant. It's hard to find a "bad guy" or "good guy" because companies are made up of both.
What you can find easily is stupidity. There appears to be alot going around in this case.
"The Sage treasures Unity and measures all things by it" - Lao Tzu
Is that covad employees blamed their problems on Verizon(as their wire provider, not as their dsl provider; covad is the dsl provider).
Verizon says this was fraudulent, or whatever you want to call it, as they had over 22,000 complaints that were not their problem.
The Covad tech showed up on time and had me up and running in about an hour. The only issue I had with him was that he forgot his socket wrench set at the previous install and needed to borrow mine to get the NID open.
I'm happy with the DSL line, now that it is installed, but I truly wonder if all of these problems would have occurred if I'd ordered the Verizon package instead of the Covad one. I got the feeling that Verizon was sending the trainees out to deliver the CLEC loops, while sending the more competent (a relative term!) techs out to service Verizon customers.
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wagn'nagl dominos.
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
I have no idea how true these claims are WRT Covad, but here's what I saw. I contracted DSL from BellAtlantic 2 years ago. The tech who came to install it put the high pass filter in at the box and ran my line off the phone terminals. At the time I had no idea how ridiculous this was. But after waiting more than a week for a tech to return, I ambushed a guy working in someone else's apartment. I showed him the work done by the previous tech and he just started laughing his ass off. He set me up with a new filter in the apt. with the voice hooked into my existing phone wiring and the data run to a new internal line to where my systems were. So, my point is, Verizon wants us to think Covad techs were clueless. Well, I can guarantee there were just as many clueless Verizon techs out there.
That said, the service has been excellent for these two years. Outages occur, but usually short lived (2 hours) and perf has been exactly as advertised (620/90). I know I probably got lucky in this regard, but I really don't have a negative thing to say about the service. I just find it highly amusing that they would criticize the quality of someone elses techs. This is the same company whose techs I've actually seen first hand pull other people's circuits down just so they can close the order they're working on at that moment.
Verizon has to be one the worst companies in existance. I agree that union labor is partly to blame. My Verizon phone line is really terrible quality. I never can get higher than 26.4 on a modem because of the poor line quality. Plus my phone has gone out about 4 times this past year. This last occurance I managed to get them to finally put a NIC box on the outside of my house. Now I don't have to answer the dumb question of Are you sure it's not your internal lines? nonsense. BTW, it was always the Verizon line being down and not my lines. I have seen, I'm not kidding here, Verizon trucks in my neighborhood every day for the last couple of years.
Anyway, Starpower is bringing a new fiber optic line into my neighborhood and they are offering phone service through it (as well as cable)!! I already told them I want to sign up as soon as possible. I have had dreams about the moment I no longer have to rely on Verizon for anything! Strangely enough, Verizon is digging new phone lines for my neighborhood at the same time. We have 2 work crews now - it's like a war zone here.
I've been telling those idiots that we needed new lines for years and now that there's real competition, they finally give it to us. Well sorry Verizon, too little, too late. Hello Starpower!
Since Qwest never answers their phone.
...)
(It's all Covad's fault! Yeah, that's the ticket
- bridgette
He: I left my tools at your house. Give'em back.
Me: You can pick them up between 8 am and 2 pm on Wednesday the 31st.
(Me goes to work on the 31st and he has to call me back to reschedule)
Seriously, if Verizon was getting so many bogus tickets, you'd think their dept would be happy to be able to resolve so many by just crossing them off and get a large increase in Productivity! Of course, the reason they didn't do this is that Verizon is just blowing smoke to cover for all the problems they intentionally caused to lasso Covad customers into their own arms...
Boss of nothin. Big deal.
Son, go get daddy's hard plastic eyes.
Expanding a vast wasteland since 1996.
This story ran yesterday at ZDNET
Best Slashdot Co
Now of course, they have to deal with the DDoS from the /. effect..
Could the anonymous reader be another covad employee?
A contractor I know (who does installs for Covad) mentioned Speakeasy, so I went to dslreports.com and checked them out. Looked good (in NYC, anyway), so I ordered their /usr/radsl/pro or somesuch (1.5 down, 384 up) and 10 days later I was getting just that. The Covad employee I spoke to during the process had to check to see who (locally) would provide my line...Verizon! Not good. (Though his actual quote was, "OK, we're about done on our end; let's see who gets the ball next...oh crap! You've got Verizon! Ok, that stays between you, me and the barn door.") (I assumed that to mean he didn't want me repearing that but hey, I'm a New Yorker - what do i know about barn doors? ;)
No tech had to come by, my self-install kit arrived a few days late but all in all, I had the connection I wanted in less than 2 weeks.
Speakeasy certainly gets my recommendation (though it's unfortunate that most of my friends had DSL by the time I tried Speakeasy ;)
Companies unfortunately do these types of things. Recently I've heard (seriously not a joke) that some of the power companies had knowingly forced themselves into bankruptcy so politicians would ease sanctions and allow them to charge higher prices for power.
Many people look at things on the whole eastern telco view as being monopolized by Verizon as it stands so creating an outrageous scenario followed by massive complaints against Verizon would have done Covad some good in the eyes of the courts, however I would be careful about taking Verizon's word for it since their not an independent party to the case, and will often point out the best faults they could find whether or not they're circumstantial.
Want Root?
I found out, because I went down and looked at the boxes myself. The DSP had been connected to the wrong box. Verizon came out and fixed it. Perhaps Verizon was told to put the DSP in the wrong place, but how is that possible considering that they had my phone number. The mistake was understandable. However, the fact that it took them a month to come back and fix it was unforgivable. I have to give the Covad people credit. They were out here the day after the Verizon people did the fix, as well as the day after the first attempt at putting in the circut. For only two days has the circut gone down in a year and it was Verizon's fault when they did some Central Office equipment upgrade. Maybe Covad was lying about that, but I doubt it.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Versizon is suing Covad over this, so it's no joke. From my own experience, Verizon is just like every other baby bell. They put the dsl circut on the wrong box about 100 yards from my building, instead of the box less than 10' from my office. It took them a month to get back out to fix it. The Covad technicians were 10x as helpful as the Verizon morons.
Someone you trust is one of us.
Well, not really total defense... It seems so far everyone is all over Verizon because they are a bad company. Well, that's true most of the time. Remember, DSL is voodoo anyway, but very cool voodoo.
My company has 13 T1's from various providers, being local, ld, voice and data. In our old building Verizon provided the local loop on OC-3. I called Verizon one day to tell them we were going to move and to give them a heads up that we'd need a new OC-3 installed. The engineer I talked to asked me what I was doing after lunch that day. He actually wanted to meet me that day to being the process.
As far as our local CLEC is concerned all they had to do was submit a move order, even a few days ahead of our move, and their T1s to us owuld have been moved with all the others. They couldn't do that and missed our move date by a week. When my contract is up with them I am going to find out if the CLEC's numbers are portable.
Just look at it this way. Verizon's corporate culture may be ineptitude and the union way, but some of their employees are actually A-OK guys just trying to get the job done in a shitty situation, give them the benefit of the doubt unless they do something really dumb or anti-social in front of you.
When Covad suddenly shut off DSL services, I cannot tell you how much this affected corporate america (our company included). Maybe this will be the next NBC movie or next hacker movie? Anybody in Hollywood reading this I am sure is having those kinds of thoughts go through there heads.
"With enough memory and hard drive space, anything in life is possible!"
Now that this is in the open, presumably the behavior will stop and it should be a lot easier
to get technical support as a customer!
I guess every cloud has a silicon lining... or something like that.
"as plurdled gabbleblotchits on a lurgid bee" - Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz. (One man's humorous is another mans flamebait)
I have long wondered if a large monopolistic company could wreck some havoc by hiring a handful of independant programmers and telling them to start submitting bogus bugzilla reports, submitting patches with intentional bugs and doing other creative things to break the trees of large OSS projects.
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Slashdot monitor for your Mozilla sidebar or Active Desktop.
The company I work for has a number of ISDN lines going to places on the east coast. The reliability of these lines for the first few months of operation is usually horrible. One problem we have seen _many_ times, is they claim they tested the line, and there were no problems..."It must be your equipment!" Imediatly after they do "their testing", the problems fix themselves. In this process, Verison takes no blame.
I can easily see Verison considering problems like these as false trouble claims. We now just immediatly call them when there is a problem, and open a ticket. 95% of the time they admit to a problem, or "test" the problem away.
One lady actually had the audacity to say "sir, you know we are Verison, we don't have problems like that." The funny part is that ticket was actually a problem they admitted!
Anyway, I believe Verison is playing games with Covad.
Disclaimer: I own Covad stock, although not much.
-Pete
Soccer Goal Plans
pax
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09
AND, having worked for Airtouch (excellent company to work for) when it was bought out by Bell Atlantic (bane of existence, change your name all you want, you're still Bell) This sort of thing is quite normal. The people high up in the chain at Verizon are as much of money grubbing, scum-sucking fools as Larry Ellison. Too bad Covad went bust before they had the chance to bring what ANY of the Baby Bells do to competition in their areas. USWest does it here in AZ, PacBell does it in CA, Verizon does it on the east coast. It's pathetic.
"See, we plan ahead! That way, we never have to do anything now."
Here on the East Coast Verizon is The Great Satan. Especially in Manhatan. It works like this:
"Well fellas we got us 30 DSL hook ups scheduled for taday an' looks like 25 of'em is Covad. Whatta we say to DSL that ain't Verizon?"
"Fuck 'em."
"And why do we say that?"
"Because we ain't got no stock in 'doz companies."
"Right. Now lis'sen, it's 9 AM I want'cha ta do the 5 Verizon jobs and then meet us at the bar on 10th and 2nd by 11. Hey we're fucking union what're they gonna do; fire us?"
This really happens, every day.
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This
I don't doubt that Verizon sucks -- I'm just skeptical of your statement that getting sued is going to be good for Covad. Large company sues smaller company that happens to be in the right is not usually good news. Remember what happened to Aureal?
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
Uh... Did you read the article? Verizon is suing Covad, claiming that all those problems that Verizon is getting blamed for are actually Covad's fault. Sorry, no revenge today.
"Research is what I am doing when I don't know what I am doing." -- Wernher von Braun
What sweet revenge for people like me that endured months of wrangling with the various disconnected business units of Verizon to sort out the simple task of processing my Covad work order. I spent hours on the phone with the mentally-crippled drones at Verizon because they kept rejecting Covad's DSL work orders for my DSL line.
The reason, I finally discovered after so much hassle, is that Verizon keeps a separate "service" address for certain customers that is wholly unrelated to the street address. For instance, my service address listed my city as "Manhattan." Folks, Manhattan is a borough in New York City, and how I (or Covad) was supposed to know Verizon's service addressing system is beyond me. Of course, Verizon's systems are too fragmented to cross reference a street address, so they just kept rejecting the order again and again.
Obviously this was very frustrating for me, but also for Covad. Covad really worked as my advocate during this process, and I saw first hand how stupid the Union-teet-feeding cretinous knee-biting Verizon employees were. We're talking the sludge at the bottom of the barrel here.
To make matters worse, when the Verizon techs finally showed up, I had already spent two days waiting around my house missing work while Verizon failed to appear at all. They guy they sent was a complete loser with a totally unprofessional attitude. (He kept asking if he could play ping-pong because I have a table.) Then he announces that he can't find the box, and makes me go around knocking on my neighbors' doors to locate the goddamn box. When we finally find the thing, he spent about ten minutes (out of the ~30 hours of work that I missed) fiddling with a box that was OUTSIDE in PLAIN VIEW and DID NOT REQUIRE ME TO BE HOME. Then he promptly left all of his gear in my house and harrassed me for days afterward to try to get it back. (I fedexed it to him at home, on my penny. Thank you so much.)
I really learned to hate Verizon during that experience, so I applaud any effort to obstruct Verizon. As far as I'm concerned Verizon has a price on their head in the commercial marketplace, and any bounty hunters have an absolute right to shoot to kill.
Ooh! Ooh! I know this one! It's me, right?
Seriously, though... I play so much FF that I think I'm developing carpal tunnel just from all the walking back and forth to level up.
psmylie's dictionary: Godzillion (noun) Any number large enough to destroy Tokyo
They convinced hundreds of Verizon's employees that they had Carpal Tunnel.
psmylie's dictionary: Godzillion (noun) Any number large enough to destroy Tokyo
When I went to read the article, the site (newscenter.verizon.com) tried set a cookie on my machine. The name of the cookie: PROACTIVE_ID. I'm just waiting for the PARADIGM_SID and SYNERGY_DYNAMICS cookies.
Enigma
Enigma
Hey, let's submit a bunch of fake requests to ourselves and it'll make us look so busy that we won't have to do quality support! But wait, what if we spent that time on actually increasing quality? Nah...it'd never work.
The Blaster Master Fighting for Truth, Justice, and Evil Pie since 1979
The mistake is thinking it's a 2 horse town. It's not. Regardless of who it's from, DSL has gotten a very black eye. Cable has a reputation for decreasing speed as more users connect and all the script kiddies to deal with. Dial-ups are taking the market. Why do you think less than aprox 3% of the USA has high speed. I'm not paying more for a connection that is going to make life miserable. Some day high speed will be ready for prime time and the masses, but not yet.
The truth shall set you free!
i hope you mean getting technical support from Verizon, because they're the ones who have been horrid IME (in my experience). maybe it's just my reseller, but i've always received excellent service for my Covad DSL and negligent service from NYNEX -> Bell Atlantic -> Verizon.
Business as usual.
Murphy's Law of Copiers
I love the smell of Karma in the morning
The DSL line hardly EVER goes down (unlike my friends RoadRunner service), when I had bandwidth issues after a recent storm , it was fixed in a day. I run 40 domains through my SDSL pipe (legally - they aren't as anal as other providers) and it has been great.
So YMMV, but it seems DSL from smaller providers may work better, because everytime I hear someone complain about DSL , its from a big provider or ISP having to go through a big provider/telco :)
So from my standpoint, DSL rocks and is an incredible way to get onto the internet, IF your provider knows what they are doing.... I mean I can get 1.1MBps SDSL (down AND up) for $450/month when a T1 can cost you $1500/mo or more. Its a great (and fairly inexpesnive) technology and look out when the newer stuff comes out.... Amazing what they cram down 2 wires!
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
Is Verizon pushing bad lines on Covad on purpose at teh highest levels? I doubt it. But could it be happening at a lower level - I'm sure of it.
All it takes is a union supervisor telling his union lackeys that Covad & other non telco companies threaten their jobs and to remember that when they install the lines for COvad to use - I'm sure many would be unusable. You'd be surpised how often stuff like this happens.
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
--Blair
I'm not a karma whore, so go ahead and mod this down (as you modded down this one); you'll be meta-moderated too.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
That would only work if you could blame MS bugs for a failure in Linux/BSD.
Perhaps this is the secret agenda behind WINE?
Toronto-area transit rider? Rate your ride.
It seems common place these days (at least here in NY) to blame Verizon for everything. Every DSL provider has to go through Verizon's equipment at some point, so why is it that some have much more trouble than others? As much as I dislike the monopoly that Verizon is trying SO HARD to hang on to, I still find it quite unfair of a company such as Covad to slander them with lies and fake reports. That rates pretty low in my book.