Slashdot Mirror
Verizon, Fiber Or Die?
dynamator writes "I live about 550 meters from my Verizon central office. I pay for their higher-tier 'Power Plan' DSL service, which boasts 3 Mbps down and 758 Kbsp up. For the past year, I've enjoyed excellent performance on this line. However, this past month Verizon has been hooking up my neighbors with FiOS, their new fiber-to-the-home system, and guess what, my connection speed and dependability have taken a nosedive. What can I do to build the case that this is really happening? Will anyone, least of all Verizon, care? Are they making me a fiber offer I can't refuse?" We discussed a few times last year what Verizon may be up to.
I know it really depends on the area what kind of service you get, but it might not hurt to just, you know, call them and ask them to send a tech to check the line. My wife and I bought a house last year and we had to downgrade from FIOS (tell me again why you won't upgrade?) back to DSL. When we first moved in we had some issues with the service dropping fairly frequently. After a couple service calls they eventually sent out an actual line tech who looked at the line and found there was a minor fault, which he fixed. Since then everything's been flawless. Maybe it really is just a coincidence, and if you can get someone to come take a look at your line you might get somewhere. Or, you could just post bitchy complaints on Slashdot and hope the CmdrTaco Fairy will come fix your line. Either way, can't hurt to try, right?
Check out Treesandthings.com for offbeat news
AT&T is kind of doing the same thing with their Uverse service. Worst service ever. They had shoddy installation, and you can't have DSL AND Uverse coming in the same residence even though they are on different phone lines.
Supposedly it is blazing fast, but AT&T doesn't offer static IP addresses on Uverse......oh well........
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
Then post your stats. For example, if your modem does give them to you, get the tech to read off the following to you:
- Line profile name (this should include what type of profile you are on, ie: interleave or fastpath, or al2 vs. al1, if you were up here)
- Sync Speed (Kbs) up and down
- Relative Capacity Occupation (%)
- Noise Margin (0..31 dB)
- Signal Power (0..20 dBm)
- Attenuation (0..60 dB)
Yes, to the ones who have done this thankless job, you can now guess what area of the world I work in and what I do now. Woohoo.
If your RCO is maxxed and you are syncing at less than the profile, your modem is syncing too high and this will cause dropouts. Your profile must be lowered, the line improved, or modem replaced. If the noise margin is under 6 dB (it's nicer if it's above 10 dB, honestly), again, you will have dropouts. Improve the lines or replace the modem. Signal power, don't worry about it too much, although both sides should be somewhat similar, it shouldn't be a big deal. Attenuation you want as low as possible, generally on a clean line, this will indicate your distance from the SLAM, and therefore the maximum speed. If you were capped at 3 mbits, you probably have an attenuation of over 35 db, which means 3+ km from the SLAM. Anything over 56 dB means you're screwed, and you're probably 5+ km from the SLAM. You could try to get the tech to send someone out to hook you up to another remote, if it exists. Good luck with that.
If you're already on interleave, you've probably got interference issues or a bad line, but nobody will care. If you're not on interleave and don't care about gaming, tell the tech to put you on interleave and say bye-bye to the problems.
Yay. That was fun. Next call please!
Verizon is using some pretty tricky things to sign people onto FIOS. And I as a dedicated Verizon hater do my best to counter it.
Example, I've pushed a half dozen people away from Verizon when I explained that their costs for the same service would actually RISE if they switched away from Cox.
In one case the sales droid for Verizon told one former co-worker of mine that Verizon owned all the coax cable that Cox used. That's complete and utter bullshit. Cox owns all the coax.
not where I live it isn't. Road Runner just went to 8 up 0.5 down. That's not a typo. 8 megabits! DSL is a joke compared to that. Even fiber isn't that much better. Do I want the file in 10 seconds or 5? Anyway, I've never seen that because I'm in a similar situation. Either they're throttling me for using about 250+ megabits this year in p2p traffic, mostly legal btw, or they screwed something up when they were building the new neighborhood behind me and wiring in the cable cuz that's about when the slowness started. I get about 1 megabit now and it pisses me off. It's always that limit at 5:00 PM or 2:00 AM. And if I use a multi-source downloaded like leechget I get the full 850 KB/sec from really, really good sources. So yeah I think they're throttling me or maybe they're pulling some similar scam or something.
Google's Super Secret Search Algorithm: SELECT @search_results FROM internet WHERE @search_results = 'good'
I work for a smallish Canadian telco. We offer DSL, IPTV, and telephone all over copper. Our infrastructure is all FTTN, and you can pull 10mbps at 600m easy. If you're on our service, 20mbps is possible if you have HDTV. There's one of two things going on here. Verizon is trying to screw you, or there's something wrong with your line.
If it's the former Verizon won't help you. If it's the latter, a tech should be able to fix it. If you're only 550m from the CO you might not have an access cabinet in between you and the CO, but there should be many pairs into the pedestal near your house. A tech should be able to just do a pair change and fix it. The other thing that could happen is a port change in the CO. Both of these are quick, as long as the CO is manned. We have about 25 in this city, and only 1 is manned full time.
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
Boston? I thought Silicon Valley East was Alexandria, VA (and surrounding DC tech corridor).
I can confirm that. My SO worked at the London, Ontario office (yay outsourcing) that handled Verizon calls and the single most important metric was call handle time. If you weren't operating under a certain amount of time you didn't get bonuses and were seen as an incompetent tool. It doesn't matter that the person on the other end may be elderly and not follow instructions quickly - rush them and get them off the phone. They've got a complaint? Placate them with a bullshit story and get them off the phone.
Rogers and Bell are just as bad up here as well. I've spent 7 hours on the phone (15 minutes total talking, rest of the time on hold) with Bell resolving billing issues. With Rogers I lost service in Toronto for 10 days, and the rep actually accused me of lying that my modem wasn't online - he claimed he was pinging it - and became abusive. I hung up on him. The next day Rogers discovered subway workers or someone else had cut a line that caused my outage. Why they didn't figure something was up when the rest of the neighborhood was complaining, I don't know. It certainly couldn't have affected just my place.
Hey, this is slashdot, I applaud you for that.
All your base are belong to Wii.
Actually Boston was a center of computer technology when Silicon Valley was just cheap farmland.
The thing that happened was that the Boston area IT firms were largely minicomputer outfits (like DEC and Prime) or special purpose engineering workstations (Apollo, Symbolics), not to mention many spin-offs and laboratories involved in advanced CS work. The thing was the area's IT market got hit by a kind of perfect storm in the late 80s and early 90s: the collapse of the minicomputer market segment, the flagging of investor interest in artificial intelligence, the weakening of the workstation market, and a post Soviet Union drop off in government spending on the ultra-high-tech defense research that was a regular source of business creation in the university rich Boston area. At the same time, continued high property values made it less attractive for young engineers graduating from Boston schools to stay here.
Still, the Boston area continues to grow high tech startups in a variety of technical fields because of the sheer volume of academic research here; it's just that we haven't experienced the next big thing after the informatics boom of the 70s and 80s, and we missed out largely on the Internet bubble of the 90s. When the next thing happens, say if biotech takes off like informatics did in the 70s, we'll probably see Boston as an early hot spot, as it was in the 40s through 80s for computers.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I had a similar problem with AT&T (previously SBC, previously Pacific Bell, Previously ... etc). My 3MB Dropped to intermittent connection reliability and then stopped cold. They eventually confirmed (or admitted) that my modem doesn't establish communication. So they came out and spent many weeks trying to find the problem. Finally, a third tech said that it works fine at some utility box 1,000 feet from my house but not at the wall of my house. So they spent a few more weeks digging up the ling through the street, my yard, other yards, until they found a tiny 1mm crimp in a wire that was eroded from the elements and replaced the entire line from that point to my house, and from that point to the utility box (which at this point was about 75 feet from the utility box. Now, my connection is at 1.6 MB because when they activated at 3MB there was a lot of noise that the installing tech should have toned down the speed for reliability, but 1.6 is the most reliable they can get because I'm so far away from the CO (I'm at the last few hundred feet).
Anyway, the point is, anything could have happened and the only thing intentional is the degree of assistance the telco will ultimately provide. Even if it is your responsibility (inside your house) they should at least charge you and happily come fix it.
Thanks,
Leabre
It's not Verizon that is pushing that metric. It's the outsourced company that is trying to make a buck off Verizon. Not saying that Verizon's own people is better.
Call Verizon and switch to FiOS for business.
Here's what will happen:
They'll come install a second ONT on your house. You'll get 20% faster speed. You'll pay about 5% less. You won't have PPPoE and the associated latency anymore. You'll get 24/7 access to live, helpful customer service reps. Plus you'll have the option of static IPs for a fee should you decide you need them.
See, what we did here is hand over a bunch of tax dollars to the telcos when they promised to build all these fat pipes in the early 90s. Then they didn't build the fat pipes. Gotta get that whole don't-pay-for-a-product-that-don't-exist-yet thing right next time.
That's interesting and worth a try.
But in my area, they dropped PPOE for FIOS about 1-2 years ago. If you put in PPOE credentials it ignores it at this point. I only found out because I've had FIOS for 3 years, and last year I added TV. When the tech replaced my router with their actiontec, he didn't put in any credentials, and said that had been dropped some time ago.
Also, if you're nice to the installer, they'll put the ONT inside your house which is far more convenient.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
Such companies are not really off the hook, but a level of indirection can often diffuse blame. Humans have a judgment bias that sees indirect harm as less bad than direct harm. Legally there's no difference (murder-for-hire vs. hire), but ethically people have to work harder before they see the two harms as equivalent.
For example, in 2006 Merck sold the marketing rights to a cancer drug to a small company named Ovation, who then charged exorbitant rates to recoup the costs. Merck kept the sales proceeds, and continued to produce the drug, but Ovation was the company charging patients ten times more. Ovation's business model is to act as a buffer for large pharmaceutical firms that want to get a large payday out of a niche drug without getting their hands dirty.
For more information, check See No Evil: When We Overlook Other People's Unethical Behavior (Gino, Moore and Bazerman 2008) and The Preference for Indirect Harm (Royzman and Baron 2002, Social Justice Research).
Very funny. I was in line first. Been there for 10 years.
Congratulations on your DSL. They won't even sell me DSL, and fibre to the curb is out of the question since it is 15 miles to the nearest curb.
Verizon doesn't care, and the won't. When our dialup went from steady-for-hours to a few minutes at best, it took us all kinds of hell raising over a number of days to get them to fix it. Now we are back to 24K dialup. Forget 33.6, and forget any notion of 53K.
Well, not quite. Yesterday I put up a skyway dish. Happy to say we are seeing something like 5x the maximum speed that I can get from my self-proclaimed "broadband and entertainment company," a company of liars.
Problem is MOST people don't want fios.
I am content with my $42.00 top tier DSL.
Fios is available, and gee, I have to pay them $99.00 a month because I cant unbundle the other crap from the internet service. I dont want to pay $99.00 a month for their other crap. I dont want the other crap. Stop forcing me to take your other CRAP!
DSL has a law forcing them to unbundle it from phone service. That law does not cover Fios.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
File a complaint with the state Public Utilities Commission.
I did it in Illinois where it can be done online. Miraculously within two weeks I had supervisors from falling all over themselves trying to solve my problem, and what had been broken for months got fixed in a matter of days.
Do you know why? Because if the PUC has too many unresolved complaints, Verizon might not get their next rate increase, so your complaint could be worth millions of dollars if it pushes them over some particular limit.