So here we are, 10 days after my rant about issues with getting my FiOS Internet speed upgrade.
The good news is, I’m officially running at the 150 Mbps that I originally wanted … sometimes.
The bad news is, I’m not super crazy about what I had to go through to get it.
Here’s a quick timeline…
- 10/23 – Found upgrade options missing online; no luck with support via phone or Twitter.
- 10/29 – Sent an e-mail pressing further, response back that it was a mgt. decision.
- 11/12 – Sent an e-mail to Verizon’s head over FiOS, got a response from his office in a matter of hours
- 11/13 – Spoke on phone with exec. customer support who overrode issue and scheduled my upgrade
- 11/16 – Tech came out, did install
It turns out that the final version of the story that I was given is that Verizon ran out of equipment nationwide, so in the meantime they decided to limit this particular upgrade to new customers until they were able to get their hardware issue under control. I didn’t ask if it was related to next year’s sale to Frontier because I wouldn’t blow a lot of money on equipment if I was selling the business soon, but it frankly wouldn’t surprise me…
Anyways, the gentleman from the VP’s office was very polite and offered to honor my upgrade by first submitting an order to upgrade me to 300 Mbps to get my order through the system, then coming in afterwards to back it down to the 150 Mbps that I actually wanted. And I did get my router included, though there was a one-time $150 install fee which I was honestly fine with at this point.
The install itself went super smooth – better than most, in fact – because instead of running a new ethernet line through the attic from the ONT to my router, he was able to make use of an existing line that ran to a smart panel in my closet where the router now resides anyways, so all in all we were probably done in about two hours. Speed tests were a little bit of a pain just because only my server is currently hardwired and it doesn’t have Flash installed which 99% of the speed tests require, but we worked it out nonetheless…
It was definitely hard to say goodbye to that 300 Mbps, though in no way can I justify another $90 on top of what I’m paying already, plus in reality I did find that the places I normally download from couldn’t push more than about 200 Mbps at me at a given time anyways … which was kind of expected. So it’s certainly worth noting that as sexy as the prospect of gigabit ethernet is, it’s really only useful for multiple devices pulling at the same time at least for the time being.
Still, this effectively doubled the speed in which I can download movies and TV shows, so that’s cool!
Also, my ping time is roughly 1/4 of what I was used to seeing, so also cool.
That said, even in just a day I’ve noticed my speed wobbling a bit – sometimes I can get the full 150 Mbps, sometimes it clocks in less than the 75 Mbps that I had before … not sure if that’s just standard Internet congestion (though I didn’t see it much before) or if moving me over to GPON puts me on a busier node where I’m competing for bandwidth more than I did when I was on BPON. Will have to keep an eye on that…
Anywho, at the end of the day my only real complaint is simply that I had to jump through so many hoops to get where I am today. One typically shouldn’t have to complain to a VP in order to get their service upgraded, and better communication at any step in the chain would’ve at least calmed me down and made me a little more understanding. I guess the moral is if you’re not getting anywhere with customer service, just go straight to the top and try there instead … which is terrible advice, really, but it seemed to work here.
I made the link above to said VP’s reference clickable just in case anyone else has the same problem… 😉