Today marks exactly one month since the first of two Verizon errors took our Internet service down for eight days. For all that my wife and I suffered through, we’ve received barely more than insincere apologies, spoken as if they were offered by some soulless automaton. Our many social media posts about our Verizon outage resulted in numerous comments, many of which echoed our pain. It was strangely comforting to find that we were not alone in being victimized by Verizon, and it is deeply disturbing to learn how often Verizon’s carelessness has caused so much pain and suffering.
Here are a few valuable lessons we’ve learned during our Verizon ordeal. First, no matter what anyone tells you, Verizon is not capable of supporting a reasonable level of reliability related to the availability of it’s FIOS Internet service. Verizon may testify that it’s technology is superior, or that it has the best fiber optic network, but their weakest link is in it’s human components and sloppy operational policies. This may sound harsh, but both of the outages involving our Verizon FIOS outage were caused by preventable human error. Both errors could have been detected and corrected immediately, but Verizon didn’t verify their work, or chose not to validate the results of the service changes they made. Not even the best technology can stand up to human carelessness, ignorance and/or stupidity.
For two years our nation has been severely crippled by the coronavirus pandemic, and for two years a large majority of our workforce, and most schools, colleges and universities have had to rely heavily on broadband Internet access to work and attend classes remotely. While some Internet providers grasped the importance of going the extra mile to keep us all connected, Verizon exercised a lackadaisical attitude regarding how it maintained customer connections, or restored broken services, even when it was Verizon who caused the damage.
My warning to you is this; If you have, or are considering Verizon FIOS Internet service, and you work from home, or have children who attend classes remotely, or if you have medical equipment or security devices that require Internet access, avoid Verizon completely or purchase a backup Internet service like a mobile hot-spot or 4G/5G mobile router and a data plan. Verizon left us without Internet connectivity for 8 days. If it can happen to us, it can happen to you.
In future articles I hope to cover alternative Internet service providers, better equipped and staffed to provide more resilient Internet capability than Verizon, and some details regarding the backup Internet system we’ve installed to protect us from Verizon’s continued carelessness.