Dealing with Verizon

Sign Me Up

Since they were the only ISP I could contact (the others may have had great web pages, but I had no internet access, so that was not an option) and they provided the services (minimal) that I wanted, I agreed to go ahead with Verizon as an ISP.

Now signing up in this electronic age is just wonderful. Wonderful, that is, if you have internet access, which I didn't at this stage! Not to worry, says the man from Verizon, we can send to a neighbour. So, without asking, I volunteered my neighbours. (I later apologised for doing so, but they have had no problems with me doing this - it's nice to know your neighbours!). Well, the operation is that Verizon sends an email with a number of attachments, describing the service being quoted and the terms and conditions. I cannot change them, just accept or refuse. They seemed OK, so I accepted them, which basically requires that I email all the attachments back to Verizon. OK. I did want some additional services, but the agent told me better to get the ball rolling and add them later. OK, he's the expert!

Next day, my internet connection came back to life - a T1 line connecting Verizon's DSL service to WinStar had become inactive and some hocus pocus and some not-so-swift of foot actions resulted in being reconnected to the world.

In the meantime, I received another set of agreements from Verizon, including some of the changes I wanted.

On August 7th I received notification that my order had been accepted, and would go to contract management and should be completed within 3 to 4 weeks! OK, well, if that's how long it takes, I guess so. Although how it would take 4 weeks to perform two steps (remember, I already had DSL service from Verizon the phone company!) each taking no more than half an hour each was beyond my comprehension. But so be it.

Of course, 4 weeks ends up about September 11th, which rather dented interest in such things. (And Verizon is the company which had a telephone exchange crushed by the falling WTC buildings, so I allowed they might have other things on their plate too.) Anyways, I called the number to find out what had happened.

September 20th

I called Verizon the ISP's contract status number, and after a wait of some minutes, was told that my contract was stalled waiting for my old ISP (WinStar) to disconnect me from their DSL system. Hmmm, nobody mentioned this need to me, and since I know the front office doesn't know I'm a customer, they'll ignore requests to disconnect me. (In WinStar's favour, their technical side has had no problems with me, and have been quite helpful the odd time I called them.) OK, so let me see if I can talk to WinStar to do this disconnection.

I called the (only) phone number I had (a local number) and heard a recorded message saying "Office Hours are 8 - 5 Monday to Friday". This was Thursday, but after 2PM (5PM East Coast Time) so I decided to try tomorrow morning. Perhaps this number was now diverted to the east coast office. Come Friday morning, I received the same message. Guess that means there's nobody at that number any more. And, of course, not being a customer, and not being billed, I have no idea how to contact them.

I went to WinStar's web page, to see if they have contact information. Well, they do, in the form a web form to fill in and send to either Technical, Sales or Billing. So I choose billing, not quite sure which of them seemed important. Not that I expected a response - WinStar seems to be an information sink.

September 25th

Time to call again - the usual wait, then I explained my ISP situation (yet again) to another Verizon person, who said I should call another Verizon person, who could "unmap" my old ISPs connection. Ah, this was progress, or so it appeared.

I made the call, and told my story one more time, and was told that the unmapping could be done, but would take two weeks and that I would receive a call when it was done. OK, slow, but some more progress.

October 2nd

No internet access! I guess the unmapping has been done. No phone call, but still it's only one week, not the two I was told. Or, of course, WinStar might have stopped existing.

October 9th

Well, the two weeks was up, so time to call again to see what's happening with my order. Explain the situation and its latest steps yet again. Oh, the application needs to be resubmitted now that the line has been unmapped. OK, the kindly person I was talking to was able to do this, and suggested I call back at the end of the week to check on progress.

October 15th

Another call, and, by golly, it all looks good. Within a few days ("but realistically wait until the end of the week") I should have a date for the switch over.

October 19th

The end of the week, but instead of a date, I hear the order has been cancelled, and has "returned to provisioning" (not that I was planning a long voyage, although this has turned into one). I don't know who or what provisioning is or does, but my order has been there a number of times. It so far has never come out of there with any progress, as best I can tell.

October 22th

By now, even I am getting annoyed at this plain, simple incompetence. If there was really a choice, I would have exited this operation long ago. But the only alternative I know about is a company called Covad, who may not be much better off financially than WinStar, though I don't know either way. Covad is not (to the best of my knowledge) in Chapter 11, nor does it appear to be heading that way. But non-telephone company DSL providers have not had a good survival record so far. And for a number of reasons, I'd prefer to use the phone company as my DSL provider (it is, after all, their wires that the signals use).

So another call, and this time the hold up is that no DNS Service option was chosen. Another call, another reason. They must have a card with a bunch of reasons on it, I suppose. Anyway, I am transferred to my salesman, to fix the DNS issue.

Of course, the left hand and right hand don't know about each other, but at least they are physically close. I explain the current problem, and the saleman goes over to talk to the representative I was speaking to just above. When he returns, he says there's doubt about whether my line is qualified (the previous two years of DSL service was, apparently, not an indication of this) and that he'd need to dig further, and would call back by 2:30PM my time.

Of course, 2:30 arrived, and went, but the phone remained silent.

October 23rd

Waited until another 2:30 had passed (perhaps he meant tomorrow), and still nothing, so I call the salesman. He seemed rather incredulous that I would call him for a "technical problem", and mentioned that he could not find out any more information yesterday because all the folks involved "were in a meeting". Anyway, while I had him on the line, I signed up for "DNS service", which I presumed I had already done, since the agreements emailed back in early August mentioned that Verizon insists upon running the DNS servers for my domain. Suits me fine - I have no need or desire to run a public DNS server.

The salesman puts me on hold, while something I know nothing about takes place. He then comes back on, saying that he can wait trying to reach the contract status folks, but that it would make more sense for me to do so. Which it does, so I waited once again to speak to somebody to find out today's excuse.

When I finally spoke to the "next available representative", it appeared that my order was marked with a big red X, as I was told that I would receive a call in a few minutes.

Surprise. I did get a call back. This person sounded like the next step up in the management ladder, and apologised for it taking so long blah blah blah etc. And, of course, it would take another week to get a date for the DSL line to be connected to Verizon's network. Note, not a week to do it, but a week to get a date by which it would be done. Well, I suppose that's progress. But as of this writing, the week is not up.

The Beginning
Lights, Camera, ...