NO HOLDS BARRED

By Eddie Goldman

By the grace of Kahless the Unforgettable, my Verizon(lol) landline and Internet are back, for the moment at least.

I reported almost two weeks ago that there had to be an outage in my area, since at that time the voice line was down but not Internet. Since Wednesday night, both were up and down like a yo-yo. But when I called the regular Verizon repair, as usual I got an unhelpful and rude rep who denied there was, or even could be, any outage in the area.

On Friday morning, August 3, I got a voicemail from Verizon admitting that “your service disruption was caused by a cable failure”. It appears Verizon’s strategy to paying customers making such reports is to cause them so much aggravation that they either just quit complaining or die.

Now the service is back, but we shall see for how long. This type of outage and back-and-forth has happened about once or twice a year over the past several years.

You have to escalate, first as I did by calling their so-called “Executive Relations” team, at 855-655-2304 (this is just for New York), and then, as is also usually necessary, filing a complaint with the New York State Public Service Commission.

Verizon, in violation of its franchise agreement with the City of New York, still does not offer its Fios service in much of New York City. This rollout was supposed to have been completed by 2014.

The New York State Public Service Commission is kicking the scab Spectrum cable company out of the state, and we should pressure the politicians to make sure this actually happens. But the next target of both state and city officials has to be revoking Verizon’s Fios franchise.

What we really need is municipal broadband, but this unfortunately is a longer-term goal since all the state and city officials are puppets of Wall Street, the real estate sharks, etc.

Labels: cable, Eddie Goldman, Fios, Internet, New York, No Holds Barred, outage, telephone, Verizon