I am in complete shock, although by now I shouldn't be, that yet again this month Verizon has overbilled me for my services to them to the tune of 50.00. I called them four weeks ago and spent an hour getting through to someone, and when I hung up was assured that not only was everything resolved but that I would be refunded the money I had been incorrectly charged for. At that time I also requested that my movie channels be turned off.

Ahhh, it is time again for my bill....guess what? Still getting overbilled, still have the movie channels, it's like I never even called. And I get completely stressed every time I do call them because I get shifted from department to department to department, which eats up huge quantitites of time. This company sucks.

Their service is all right, but with this much stress who needs it? Oh, I should mention that our cable box crashes repeatedly at least three or four times a week

So you are thinking of Verizon Fios for your home? Think again. Here is what happened to me.

On January 16th I ordered the Fios "bundle" from Verizon, using their 1-800-get-fios number. I go through about five levels of voice prompts, no people, only to get a message stating "all circuits are busy, try again later". I try a half dozen more times that week, without success.

I try signing up using their internet site. You go through about a dozen prompts before getting a "page not found" error message. You try three or four more times only to get the same error.

I finally spoke with a Verizon technician who was working in the neighborhood and asked him if there was another way of contacting Verizon for setting up Fios in my home. He gives me a number to try. The number was busy each time I called, three times each day, for three days. I finally got through to a real person. This is six days from when I made my first call.

The Verizon employee sets me up for installation five weeks from that day, February 22nd, between 8 and 5.

Now the fun begins.

On the evening of February 21st, I receive a call from Verizon (to my answering machine) stating that it was going to rain or snow the next day, so installation was postponed. The next available day was March 27th and they would be out between 8 am and 5 pm. So now it's going to be eleven weeks from my initial call in order to have it installed.

So I try calling Verizon for the next three days, going though all the voice prompts, four different people, and about two hours of phone time just to find out WHY? The fifth person I spoke with said he may be able to get the installation moved up a few days, but would need a supervisor's permission. Sorry, but they are all on calls right now. He took my number and promised one would call back within an hour. So I wait and wait for two more days. No call.

The next day I called the toll free number, went though all the voice prompts, waited on hold for 20 minutes and spoke with a customer service tech who had no idea why I needed to wait another five weeks but would try to find out. After 15 minutes on hold he comes back on the line. He said he was sorry, but five more weeks is the best they could do. The reason, Verizon has been "overwhelmed' with installation in Maryland and New Jersey.

So I'll take off another day from work in March and hope it doesn't rain.

So do you still want Verizon Fios?

Verizon
Posted: 2008-02-11 by Elizabeth Schack [send email]
Unfulfilled commitments!

Complaint Rating:

On Feb. 4, two installers came to my home to install FIOS TV, phone and Internet service. They told me they would be working outside for a few hours before coming in to make connections, etc. After a while, I noticed there had been no sounds of activity anyplace. I also noticed the absence of my indoor pet. I went to the basement to check where the men had last been working. They were gone, with my basement door and garage door left wide open to the outdoors. I looked for their truck in back of our house and in front as well, but the truck was gone too. However, I did see my indoor pet outside at the edge of our property. Thankfully, I was able to retrieve him, avoiding a heartbreaking disaster, before he reached the nearby highway. When the men returned, they said they had gone to lunch. Common courtesy would be to tell me and to at least shut the doors behind them. They continued their “installation” , spending the next 1 ½ hours in their truck. When they finally came back inside, they began to connect the TV, DVD player, and the new STB box. They told me that my TV was broken and that the DVD player could not be connected; they said there was “no audio”. They told me I would need to disconnect the wires from the box and transfer them onto the DVD player in order to ever view a DVD. I asked them how this could be, when everything worked fine the night before. They told me to get the TV repaired, or get a new one. I asked them to please try again-maybe it was their wires. They said their wires were just fine, and folded them up and took them away. They used my old red, white, and yellow wires to connect the new box to the TV. I asked them for help setting up my Outlook e-mail and for the phone number for the voice messaging system. They told me they could not help and to call the toll free number. There was no paperwork for me to review or to sign off on, and they left, taking the new wires with them.
Although I waited on hold for one hour that evening and I was given the wrong voicemail phone number, these issues were resolved that evening, for the most part.

The following day, I called to see about the cables the installers had taken away, thinking I might need them if I got the TV repaired, or when I received my new free Fios TV from Verizon. I spoke to Nick Massi, who transferred me to a Ms. Tolliver, who transferred me to Cassandra. Cassandra assured me that, based on the ticket written by Nick, a field supervisor would be contacting me to come out and review the work done. No one contacted me that day or the next.

I was able to connect all three devices, TV, DVD player, and STB box together so that they worked. The problem now was that the DVD only played in black and white- no color. By Wednesday, Feb. 6, there was still no call. I called again and spoke to Michelle. She assured me repeatedly that the field supervisor would absolutely be calling me by 10 AM the next day. By 11 AM the next day, Feb. 7, the only call I got was one regarding voicemail, stating the problem seemed to be fixed. The repair person who left this message said there was no alternate number at which to reach me, even though I had given my cell phone number three times. However, there was still no call from the supervisor and no cables from Verizon. I called and spoke to Maggie. She had me hold while she was on hold waiting for a supervisor in DRC. We both were on hold for 35 minutes. She came back on to say she would connect me with her supervisor, Scott R. Scott told me he’d call me back in 30 minutes or less, while he contacted DRC. After 45 minutes, he called to tell me that a field supervisor would definitely contact me in the next “couple of hours”. This was at 12:43 PM. Scott had told me I’d be able to reach him at the toll free number by just asking for Scott R. By 11 AM the next day, Feb. 8, when there was still no call, I tried to reach Scott and nobody had heard of him. I spoke to Andrew. He checked and told me a field tech would be calling me and coming here in one hour. This time the tech Dan Bartkowicz, KO1, did call, but did not have the cables on his truck, nor was he familiar with video. He said he’d call me back. After waiting 30 minutes, I called him back and he said maybe a different tech would get this assignment and he was waiting to hear. At that point, I insisted to be connected to the field supervisor. He had me hold on again. When he came back on, he told me that he and another tech would be over in a few minutes. Brian May, OD3, was the other tech. They brought in the same wires the first installers took away, and connected everything successfully in minutes, including color on the DVD player. These two techs were gracious and knowledgeable and should be commended for their quick response and customer service. They were patient and asked me more than once of I had any other questions.

I realize this letter may take a while to read, as it took me a while to write. Each time I phoned Verizon, the wait time was long and each time I had to repeat this whole story. The experience was horrendous!
Comments United States Telecommunications
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I will start off by saying that I have seen first hand the unorganized mess that Verizon calls "Fios". This will be long, but believe me, it is very factual and worth reading if you are considering Fios or already have it. First off, Verizon hires 3rd party workers to do their installs. They cause tons of damage to homes and property and never want to take responsibility for it. These "technicians" are not licensed to do the work they are doing. Verizons equipment is extremely unreliable. The set top boxes for Fios TV are complete junk. They have more problems with pixelation, loss of the TV guide, and DVR's going bad then any other company I have ever seen. Verizon uses the existing coax cabling within your house for their service. The problem is, the signal coming in from their fiber box is much hotter than a signal coming from the cable company or other providers. This causes the pixelation problems. When this problem occurs, they want to charge you $95 per coax cable run to replace them. This is not legal! Once they put their signal on those lines, the lines become their responsibility to not have signal loss. The remote controls they offer are garbage and they will charge you to replace them when they break. The "new" TV guide that Verizon has released is extremely un-friendly to any user of it. It is archaic and extremely hard to use. If you have to reset the box, which you will do at least once a week, you will lose all of your settings, favorites etc... from within the guide. The browse by page function does not work in the guide. You have to go channel by channel. You might as well not have a guide at this point. When it comes to Fios Internet, there are many problems here as well. Verizon uses the coax cable in your house for the internet as well. They run a line to a splitter and to your broadband router. This method is proprietary and does not allow you to ever get a different router. Using this "MoCA" technology also does not allow VPN connections. VPN's need a constant streaming of bits for security. MoCA compresses these into blocks of bits and sends them sporadically. Therefore, your VPN will never connect due to the security timing out while trying to establish the secure connection. The only way to fix this is to have Verizon change out your cable run from coax to Ethernet from the fiber box. And for this they will want to charge you. The router they provide (ActionTec MI424WR) is complete junk. They only support basic connectivity on this router. The router is not compatible with any gaming consoles via wireless connection (PS3, XBox 360, Nintendo Wii, PSP etc...). You can open up all the ports that you want and it still wont work. For the third piece of trash service, the phone over fiber, again there are numerous issues. Once you get Fios, your copper lines (standard phone lines or POTS) are decommissioned. Verizon will not switch you back to copper once you have moved to Fios. The phone over the fiber line is incredibly unreliable. It constantly drops, has noise on the line, loses dial tone completely and worst of all, if you lose power and the battery backup on the fiber box dies, you have no phone. Not true with good old copper lines. The battery backup on the fiber unit is supposed to last 8 hours. Good luck getting 1 hour out of it. And when the battery within that unit dies, good luck getting it replaced. Verizon will charge you for a replacement after one year. Now that you know about the services themselves, now listen about the customer service. If you call to get help, you will be on hold anywhere from 2 minutes to 4 hours. Usually the ladder of the time frame. Once you get a hold of someone, it might not be the right person and you may start the agonizing process of being transferred around. Expect to spend half of your day on the phone for the majority of times that you call for support. Once you get through this headache, if you schedule for a technician to come out for repair, beware of what they tell you for time frames. They will tell you between the hours of so and so which means absolutely nothing. If the tech finishes a job early or late, he may arrive 4 hours early or 4 hours late. You basically have to take the whole day off of work and sit and wait. Then you may be part of the majority where the technician doesn't show at all. No phone call, no nothing! You waste your whole day and lose pay for the day for nothing. This may happen one time or it may happen 3-4 times before you actually see a technician. Believe me, this does happen! And more often then it should. And if you try to get some kind of credit for the lost day of pay, they will give you a measly $50 credit. Even if you have waited for a tech numerous times where they haven't shown up. Once the tech does arrive, its a crap shoot. He could be a great tech or someone who has no knowledge of how to troubleshoot or install this equipment. You may have more of a mess after he leaves than originally reported before he arrived. All in all, when it comes to their customer service, you will feel like you are constantly chasing them trying to get answers, trying to get service and you will get nothing but the run around. I hope this explanation is useful to many who are considering this terrible service. If you value your time and hard earned money, you should avoid this service at all costs. Stick with the guys who at least have reliable service and good techs available.

Let me preface this by saying that I am very pleased with my phone and internet service provided by Verizon Fios. That being said, I am completely dissatisfied with their cable service. First they promised me services they cannot provide. It seems that no one has been properly trained on how the equipment works, one person will tell you a feature is available and the next will tell you it is not. No two people under their employ will give you the same answer.

I wanted HDTV service in 3 rooms with a multi-room DVR so they can all access the same recorded programs, the representative processed the order as such and the technician installed it. As soon as I attempted to use the multi-room DVR I discovered it did not work. The same day as the extremely lengthy install, I spent an eternity on hold waiting to speak to a tech support representative, who informed me that the multi-room DVR will only work with standard set-top boxes, not with other HD boxes. So I decided to swap out the HD boxes for standard ones. The representative told me I would have to go to my local Verizon location (about 15 miles) and make the swap. I made the swap and upon hooking up the new receivers discovered that neither of them worked. I, once again, had to spend an extended amount of time on hold only to be told that they would have to send another tech to my home. The technician came out, replaced and programmed the receivers and apparently while doing so disabled one of my other receivers. I made the dreaded phone call to tech support who explained to me that the receiver in my possession (based on the ID number) was, according to their system, still in their inventory. Additionally he told me that I was still being billed (2 billing cycles) for the 2 additional HD receivers that I returned. He corrected the billing and said my next statement would reflect a credit and told me he would have to connect me to tech support to fix the receiver. Tech support was unable to correct the problem and said another location would have to handle it and that they would call me the following day. That evening alone, I spent 1 hour and 20 minutes on hold and on the phone with the representatives. The following day, I did get a phone call and finally it seemed all my receivers were working.

Now let me briefly tell you all the things that are wrong with their DVR. The scheduled programs all cut off about 2 minutes short of the end, so I have been forced to extend the recording time. The pause button is nearly for show, 3 out of 5 times if you pause a program, when you attempt to resume it, it starts over from the beginning. The fast forward feature works very similarly. I fast forward and when I attempt to resume play, it starts the recording over. The DVR does not recognize that a particular episode/movie is already on the DVR and will record it over and over, so that you will find it taped the same exact thing three times. Pause, rewind and fast forward live TV only works in the room with the DVR. You can only program the DVR (delete, record, etc..) from the room with the DVR, cannot access these functions from satellite rooms. Actually it seems the remote TV’s that access the DVR don’t work particularly well at all. I previously had Dish Network satellite service with the multi-room DVR and all of these functions were available and worked perfectly. Additionally, one of the phone representatives told me, “it would be ideal, but this is not an ideal world”.

Lastly, my bill has come in at nearly $300.00 two months in a row, when they told me the total amount for all of my services would be $210.00. Now even with the $60.00 credit that they are going to issue for the last 2 months of over-billing, it is still substantially higher than I was originally quoted. Unfortunately, in order to speak to billing you have to set aside an hour during the week between 8:00 am and 6:00 pm (the same hours that I work). It seems I have spent so many hours with their technicians and on the phone with their customer service that I should be on their payroll.

Verizon has many kinks to work out with their cable service. They seem to have bitten off more than they can chew. I agreed to a 2 year contract and desperately hope that they can fix their many issues in a timely fashion. Finally, on a positive note, their HD picture is great, it’s just a shame I cannot enjoy it on all of my hi-def televisions.