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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!
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
pax
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09
Um. Verizon's broadband engineering staff isn't unionized, unless it just happened.
correct but the SPLICERS are union and they bring the line to your d-mark
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?
I was a Teamster for 10 years. Unions are bullshit
I am finally solvent to the point where I don't live paycheck to paycheck. Union's had nothing to do with that.
I work pretty hard and as such I get paid pretty well. I go on vacation now and again.
As a Sys Admin in Manhattan I can assure I have really good first hand knowledge of how crappy Verizon is. As a person who has a lot of friends who have worked there since the AT&T days I can assure you if you go to the Telephone Bar (named for it clientel) on 10th and 2nd you'll find many Verizon workers drinking at 11 AM.
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This
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
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.
They convinced hundreds of Verizon's employees that they had Carpal Tunnel.
psmylie's dictionary: Godzillion (noun) Any number large enough to destroy Tokyo
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
Business as usual.
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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.
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