I don’t know what it is about me and FiOS installations, but remember a few months ago when I blogged about taking 5 hours to get everything setup?!
Well, Verizon just finished transferring everything to my new house, and this time it took over 6.
😯 😕 😯 😕 😯
To be honest, the whole ordeal actually started last week when I had to call up and fight with them about transferring my package to my new address. You see, even though they emphasize that you have to sign into a 2-year agreement to “lock in your rates” (early termination fees and all), apparently that agreement is only on one side of the table because Verizon’s policy when you move is to create a brand new plan, ending your previous one at the old address … that means any promotional pricing you may have had also goes out the window.
To say the least, when I was told that my new price would be $15/month more because they “didn’t offer” my package anymore, I was pretty pissed.
It wasn’t until threatening to cancel that the rep transferred me to someone else who verified that it would actually only be $5/month more, and for that $5 my Internet speed would be doubling from 25/25 Mbps to 50/25 Mbps. I still wasn’t thrilled because I was pretty satisfied with my previous package, and I had only been with Verizon since May, but at the same time I really didn’t want to go back to cable, either.
To anyone at Verizon who reads this – your policy for moving accounts is stupid and needs to be changed. I moved 4 different times when I was with Bright House over the last 9 years and never had to change my package as a result of changing my address, and they didn’t lock me into a contract to boot. If Verizon Wireless can figure out how to grandfather customers into their older plans when they roll new ones out, so can you.
Anyways…
The install itself was … tedious. Cleo was being really aggressive and wouldn’t stop barking at the tech when he showed up because she doesn’t like strangers in her house – especially men. This became problematic because he seemed really uneasy about her even with her on her leash, so I ended up having to sit with her in the other room for several hours while he worked. I wasn’t particularly comfortable about this because the last time we left someone alone to work in our house, he ended up robbing us, but there was nobody else really to watch her so I didn’t have much of a choice…
More and more time passed, and more and more trips were made out to the truck, before eventually I overheard the imminent call for help because he had pretty much replaced just about everything that he could and it still wasn’t working. Apparently us bringing our old boxes from the old house complicated things, but by then even swapping out the whole lot didn’t seem to work. Guy #2 made his appearance sometime in the early afternoon and they both tinkered about for another couple of hours, finally sorting out that the whole thing had been a software problem in the router that Guy #1 just had forgotten to release and re-initialize DHCP or something.
I didn’t follow all of it … possibly just because most of the time I wasn’t even in the same room … but I did get the distinct impression this time that the first installer didn’t so much know what everything he did was doing as know what order the steps were supposed to be in. I’ve been a computer geek for quite a while now – troubleshooting is more than just following an official process – it’s experimenting and knowing which signs mean that you’re on the right track… I don’t know, I guess there was just a lot of uncertainty that made me really wish I had been around when he was first doing things on my computer and whatnot. 😕
Anywho, after arriving right around 9:00am, I finally got the all-clear just after 3:00pm and was finally up and running once again.
At least the new speed test results are something to be happy about!
All in all, it was quite the ordeal, though, and while I may be able to look forward to not having to go through this again until I buy another new house, admittedly I am still a little nervous to see what my next bill looks like and if I’m going to have to call back to fight my way through customer support hell again to get a monthly bill that’s closer to what I originally agreed to when I first switched to FiOS way back in May 2012.
TL;DR – Dear Verizon … moving FiOS from one address to another 10 miles away shouldn’t be this difficult.