for those of you who say land lines are reliable

[N8N]

I just got a call from my mom, to tell me yet again to not bother trying to call on the land line, to call her cell instead if I need to tell her anything.

this is getting rediculous, Verizon has to have the worst customer service of any "legitimate" company in the history of this country. I mean, I can't imagine anyone else providing such awful service and staying in business. Why *don't* more people just cancel their land lines? (I know why my parents don't, they live too far out in the country to get cable. Otherwise...)

She said she was calling her state representative AGAIN to complain, and that several neighbors were without service as well...

nate

[dpb]

N8N wrote: ...

Because the land line _IS_ more reliable. Does she have backup generator to keep the cell charged during power outages, for example?

I'd never consider eliminating the land line in a rural area, meself...

--

[gfretwell]

Does she have POTS service or the new broadband deal?

My Embarq/Sprint/United Telephone service has NEVER been down in 25 years except for an hour or two when they were switching over the overhead wires to underground fiber backbone with underground feeds to the homes.

[badgolferman]

Does she have Verizon FiOS service? If so she may have a problem with the ONT (Optical Network Terminal) attached to her house. It requires constant power and may be plugged into a switched outlet. Once her service has been set up and verified operational the chances of having a phone problem in the network is slim unless there are group outages.

[Oren]

This guy visited the CEO's home.

Video:

[Caesar Romano]

On Wed, 05 Aug 2009 11:54:51 -0700, Oren wrote Re Re: for those of you who say land lines are reliable:

Good one!

[tom]

My AT&T Pots line has been as reliable as government taxation for the last

20 years.

[Percival P. Cassidy]

Six or seven years ago on Long Island Verizon dug up one of their own cables, which was not where their drawings said it was. Of course the circuits were duplicated -- but the duplicates were in the same cable bundle!

Perce

[mkirsch1]

Dunno about him, but my folks have Verizon POTS service, and it goes out about once a year. They call Verizon and they ALWAYS, without fail, threaten my mother that if they find the problem inside the house, that she will have to pay for the repairs. They don't inform, they THREATEN.

[N8N]

POTS. There is no "new broadband deal" in their area.

You're lucky. My own experiences with Verizon (in two different states, and nowhere near where my parents live) were equally shitty.

nate

[N8N]

make them put in one of those grey demarc boxes where the wire enters the house, that way they can say with 100% certainty that the failure is Not Their Problem by simply plugging a hard wired phone into the demarc with the line going into the house disconnected.

nate

[Cindy Hamilton]

I've been owned, sold and bought again by AT&T a couple of times in the last 30 years. It's always been reliable (except, e.g., when a backhoe ran over the box in the front yard.) I think we're forced to conclude that it's Verizon that's shitty.

When the power in the East went out in 2003, our land line performed like a champ. Cell phones were useless, not just because they couldn't be charged, but also because they were swamped by people using them who only had cordless phones at home. They'll pry my 2-pound (I really should weigh it) Western Electric desk phone out of my cold, dead hands. (They'll have to shoot me first, because it's an effective bludgeon.)

Cindy Hamilton

[Zootal]

Make sure you understand who owns the box. I had an phone line problem that turned out to have been caused by a bad connection in the box. The phone company said their lines were fine, and it was my problem. The box is theirs, but the guy testing the lines was not experienced or knowledgable enough to test the box itself. I ended up having to fix the phone companys problem to get my phones to work right.

[mike]

Yeah, right. Most people's land lines go down once a decade, if that. How do cell phones stack up?

I'm lucky if I only have one dropped word per sentence when talking to some idiot with a cell phone. Hate 'em. (Cell phones, not the idiots).

-- Please report all anti-Marxist speech to [e-mail]

[Don Phillipson]

Land lines are reliable because they are powered by the nearest relay station, not the household electric supply, thus function OK during local power outages. Of course they are wholly reliable only with a wired connection. Cordless phones fail during local outages (because they need household current to maintain the base station.) The OP did not say whether the mother uses a reliable wired phone or a vulnerable cordless phone.

[George]

Possibly, but what would people be wining about if they did a truck roll and found fluffy had chewed a wire under the coffee table?

Their responsibility ends at the NID. On the few times I have had to call them (both for elderly relatives, two total times over 10 years) they were simply upfront about following troubleshooting. I informed them I had plugged a known good phone into the NID. They did a truck roll. They fixed the problem. One case was a leaky protector and the other was because of the overhead drop getting trashed by tree branches.

[George]

And more importantly did she pick a cell carrier that actually has lots of battery and also generators on most all of their equipment?

[Nate Nagel]

Both, so there are wired phones in the house. They're not idiots either, they know enough to t'shoot a house problem vs. telco problem. It used to be only a couple times a year that it'd go down but it is becoming more and more frequent as time goes by.

nate

[PatM]

It's called a car-charger. I bet she had one.

[badgolferman]

As a former Verizon FiOS employee who left on my own accord I can tell you there will continue to be shitty customer and technical service as long as they treat their employees as they do now. Morale is so low that no one wants to take accountability for any issues that require more than 11 minutes to fix. That's right, once you finally get through to the service center the call center representative must fix your problem in 11 minutes or get you off the phone any way they can. If somehow they can justify sending it to the network technician (Level

2) you better hope the first guy who picks up your trouble ticket doesn't just drop it back in the bucket or it'll go through many hands before someone decides to actually work on a difficult problem. God forbid you may actually need a field technician to come out. You must choose either 4-hour or 8-hour blocks of time for that service call. You better be watching the front door also because many of the servicemen will creep up to your door and lightly rap on it and then leave a NO_SHOW tag.

Verizon thinks good pay and good benefits make up for bad employee management and constant screaming of "GET THEM OFF THE PHONE!" Couple that with the worthless tools and training provided to the employees and you have a recipe for horrid service. As an employee and now former employee I would not purchase their FiOS service only because I know what happens behind the scenes when you have a problem. Their Verizon Wireless service is a tad better and essentially carries the company. The copper line service is on the way out and they are trying to sell it to whomever will take it.