I have a verizon dsl as a secondary broadband connection. It took just over 2 months (38 days) from the date it was installed to the date it actually worked. Since then its been extremely reliable. If you can deal with the setup headaches (9 phone calls in total) then it really is a good deal for the price.
Um, 38 days is a little over ONE month, last I looked. :-)
Yes i meant 1, not 2.
Realize that Verizon was originally two companies. On the West it was GTE, which had a moderately good but not sterling reputation for providing decent service (in both meanings of the word). On the east of the country it was one of the baby bells, I've forgotten which, that had absolutely the worst reputation for being able to provide either working phones or even excuses for not fixing them.
For a good long time after the merger and name change not a whole lot really changed. The west coast still had reasonably decent service, and the east coast and south still sucked bigtime. It was NOT homogonous across the country. Most people don't realize this, and as the larger part of the country had the non-GTE experience, they have problems understanding why some people will defend Verizon even a little.
I'm in GTE-land. Verizon Wireless service in the suburbia where I live has ALWAYS been and STILL is vastly superior to any of the other services for connectivity. ATT in particular is virtually useless. I realize that this isn't universal across the country. I'm just pointing out that the opposite isn't universal either! :-)
Im in the northeast (NY) and as such, am not in GTE land. And believe me, the support from verizon backs this up. As i stated earlier, the initial setup was a nightmare. Then after having having the line for a couple weeks, i decided to upgrade to the 3mb service instead of 1.5mb. This simple process took 6 days and 4 phone calls. Most of the techs i spoke with at verizon really just had no clue when it came to anything technical.
As far as getting DSL, GTE/Verizon doesn't have a wonderful reputation IF you try to get the DSL service from the phone company. The general belief starts out with "you want what?" and then moves to "it must be your fault if it doesn't work".
Whats strange is i was forced into using verizon. I called 3 other DSL companies who i KNOW have DSL in my area (my company uses one of them and they are less than 1 mile away) and they all claim that its not available. Verizon was the only one who actually saw DSL available on my line..im still baffled about this one.
Knowing this, I got DSL from Earthlink. It cost less than Verizon was charging. I got the DSL modem about 10 days ahead of when Earthlink said I'd get it from Hong Kong or wherever it was sent. They said it would take 2 weeks to get DSL carrier. I plugged the modem in when I got it. There was carrier, and it worked. Absolutely NO problems. Guess who really supplied the service? Right: Verizon. With no problems.
About 6 months later Verizon updated their routers and screwed things up so DSL didn't work. I called Earthlink support (which was still in the US then) and got someone who actually understood networking. He took about 30 seconds to discover what Verizon had done and sent them a trouble ticket. DSL was woring again next morning. I suspect I'd still be waiting if I had had to talk to Verizon tech support, and that was 4 years ago.
Maybe i should move west? ;)
-Jim
