florida v. verizon
tommy permalink | categories: Florida, business, media, news, online, service, state, utilitiesby tommy @ 1:03 pm
Verizon is making a killing on this FiOS gimmick. The demand for FiOs is so overwhelming, that at the beginning of this year, the company moved a bunch of repair technicians away from fixing landline telephone service in order to install service for those new hungry FiOS customers.
Because of that, some landline customers have had to wait up to a week for phone repair. But that’s a problem. The State of Florida wants to make sure that your phone works if you have to call 911, so they require phone companies to repair service within 24 hours at least 95 percent of the time in any given area.
Verizon knew they were not quite meeting that goal, so they went to the Public Service Commission in March to ask for an exemption. Thankfully, the PSC said no, and in fact began a probe to see just how bad Verizon was performing.
Turns out that over the past 6 years, Verizon’s record declined steadily, and failed to meet the standards 262 times in 2007, compared with five times in 2001. What was their excuse?
Verizon officials traveled to Tallahassee in April to tell regulators that the company was simply overwhelmed with demand for the FiOS service…
Attorney General Bill McCollum is not impressed, and asked the PSC to open a formal case, and begin piling on the fines. At $25,000 per violation in 2007, the petition calls for over $6.5 million in fines.
Go Florida!
No tag for this post.
Loading ...
May 16th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
maybe they’ll have to commit the crime of hiring and training more employees and spending more money on their system instead of focusing on Wall Street projections and such.
Perish the thought.
May 16th, 2008 at 4:21 pm
verizon and verizon wireless are the scummiest companies around
May 16th, 2008 at 4:50 pm
We just ditched Fios in favor of Brighthouse. It took me an hour and a half on hold with Verizon just to cancel the service. The only lightning damage we’ve ever received was through the Fios equipment in the house, it fried the ethernet card in my desktop as well as their DVR box and router. Also during installation the contractor didn’t even bury the fiber optic line in places, and where it was buried it was less than 1″ deep. Their wireless isn’t much better the way they lock down the phones they sell. All-in-all I will never do business with Verizon again if I have any choice.
May 17th, 2008 at 12:32 am
is this one of the reasons the employees were protesting?
May 17th, 2008 at 2:05 am
verizon just isn’tagoodcompany sevice packages are too costly thay need to lower there priceies bright house is more competitive and cheeper too verizon should be more like metro pcs service on a set fixed rate for all it’s serviceies like no more than $50.00 a month that will make themnumber one real fast
May 17th, 2008 at 4:24 am
Oh, say what you will, but there’s a degree of admiration for a company that can turn a retort into free advertising. I mean, this is pure genius at so many levels.
Dave
May 17th, 2008 at 8:15 am
I have had verizon phone service for 40 years. I can tell you they do not care about exsisting customers. I was offered a long distance deal from them for my landline…and when I applied for it over the phone……..was told it was for “NEW” customers only. I wrote to whom I was told the head person………..no response. Very simple thing today…Big business’ do not care about “little” people. I feel its an insult.
May 17th, 2008 at 10:50 am
Funny, they don’t have a problem hiring employees to knock on my door and harass me to buy FIOS. Sad, because I’d be very interested in FIOS… if it wasn’t Verizon. I had nothing but nightmare experiences since they took over the area, and I’m gladly free of any of their services. Just not free from them cold calling my front door and not listening to the 87 reasons I tell them no. And I’ve had two visits in the last year. The third one will hear about how maybe if they were spending more time/resources in customer service than bothering me, then I would still be a Verizon customer. God I hate that company.
May 17th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
Verizon!
they do not return calls.
they do not follow thru on promises.
mis april my internet line wentdown. why/
Verizon could not fix it. Finally in mid May i canceled service. Too many lies, too many days on hold on the phone.
JUST NOT A GOOD COMPANY TO DEAL WITH>
Bill Freely
if you want details just call 863 956 1047
and I will supply.
May 17th, 2008 at 2:53 pm
I spent a lot of years working for the big v and most of the bad things said about them are true. I have heard that verizon is considering selling off the copper network in this area to another company to focus on the fiber project. they really view employees as nothing more than expenses. they will continue to cut back on people until the fines equal more than the payroll. what is more shocking is that among verizon management this is seen as the ethical solution. i once attended a meeting shortly after gte was bought and became verizon with the sales manager of the tampa residential contact center. when another rep mentioned that the company policy of offering the largest package avail first and pushing it on even elderly customers that expressed that they only wanted basic service she commented that not offering these large packages would be considered ‘unethical sales’ on our part. she went on to remark that it was not our responsibility to help our customers budget. one of the section managers once commented to me that we only provided customer service as a courtesy, that every call was to be seen primarily as a sales opportunity. A classic example of vz tricks is the fios order my mother placed. when she ran into repeated problems with installation she canceled the order. she kept getting calls from vz telling her the order was not canceled fully and she needed to call in. when she finally did she was directed to a retention group. I knew some people who were saddled with this job. they were there just to retain the sale and tried to have my mom un-cancel her order. I encourage you to monitor you bills carefully and if you are denied a legitimate credit request a supervisor and let them know yo0u will file a complaint with the public service commission if your bill is not corrected. be kind to the rep. they are told that even an unfounded psc complaint costs the company about $10,000 in legal and other fees so they are often willing to issue more credit if it seems you might file the complaint.
May 18th, 2008 at 4:04 pm
Here I was thinking about leaving Brighthouse, to go with Verizion Vizo’s, I THINK NOT!!!!! Thanks to all your blogger’s
May 18th, 2008 at 8:17 pm
I must be the lucky one. I have only had one issue (knock on wood) with a bad router that was replaced in 3 days. I am very happy with Fios service and would recommend it to anyone, but I will say the DSL service was not the best. I have also have cable through Verizon and I can tell you honestly it hands down 10 times better than Brighthouse. Now Verizon is letting us know we have some sort of personal CSR and that person even left a voice mail with all her contact info. No I do not work for them.
May 18th, 2008 at 8:26 pm
Rebecca, you’re not the only one who was thinking of makign that switch and has change there mind.
May 18th, 2008 at 10:57 pm
i do have some friends that have been reassigned to certain support functions that identify issues with the fiber service and are correcting them. it must be stressed that the support a fiber customer will receive is 10 times better than a non-fiber customer because verizon is not supporting the pots(plain old telephone service) lines unless they are required to.
May 22nd, 2008 at 7:53 am
A lot of changes have been made recently with the core and fiber employees. I can say with 100% certainty that we will continue to see many changes. Just about 1 week ago Verizon pulled the plug on the 4 contracting groups who had contract FiOS installers in the Tampa areas. This was after the number of FiOS install orders dwindled down to the lowest volume we’ve seen since the project began.
The thing is, it costs VZ a considerable amount of money to roll out a VZ employee to install a FiOS triple play. For a contractor to roll on a triple play it costs VZ 1/3 of the price. Hmmmmm … why would VZ cut their own throught? Well let’s delve a little …
1. Lower number of install orders.
2. PSC fines VZ for missed copper commits and unsatisfied repair quotas (6.5Mil)
3. Pull plug on contractors.
4. Start offering ISPs to employees (individual seperation packages - voluntary termination … 1200 in 6 weeks WTF??).
5. VZ plead with the PSC to lower fines so that they can move a bunch of crossed trained techs back to copper and pay their salaries. PSC will look like a Hero because then they will carry back to the Public something like this, “We forced VZ’s hand to commit to us that they will employ # of techs to help with the copper plant …. we will lower fines so VZ can pay the salaries …. see a change or more fines …”
6. Core is overstaffed and fiber is understaffed (once again) and contractors will be back at it.
Take these things into consideration and it’s easy to see that VZ is so lost that they do not even understand that their head is up their own ass … what’s more, they can not understand how to pull it out once they reach the realization … either way you slice it, VZ is looking to the contractors for the majority of their work. Folks should get used to it. BH has done it for years … Kablelink, CTIS, Knight, all BH contractors. Dish Network has DRS, AsCom, mom and pop shops, all contractors. Same for DirecTV and Knowledgy.
As much as folks bad mouth the contractors, they fail to realize that the issues they have had with contracotrs are the same issues that they have with VZ techs. There is no difference between the two. Other than vZ techs badmouthing contractors to their csutomers because they are disgruntled because the contractors are “taking their overtime” - customers here only this and get the bad taste in their mouth and then find any excuse to hate the contractor. Managers for the contractors in their area, same equipment and inventory, same policies and provcedures, and on and on … contract techs are clones that are cheaper for VZ.
Poster that was speaking of the copper plant sell off … kind of right. Look for that coming. The contract is there and negotiations are taking place right now for certain parts of it. Soon we will see that the majority of the core functions are going to be contracted out … hell look at FTTP - 20 contract engineers were just 2 days ago, hired to finish the FTTP breakout. MDU and MTU is all contracted out, buried drop is (mostly) contracted out, FiOS installs (tho not right at this second)but will be again soon, FSC Reps, cutomer care, you name it … VZ is looking to save money. 2008 was the year that VZ projected to start raking in the profits of the Fiber plant. Look for change …
May 22nd, 2008 at 7:57 am
By the way, I am no longer a contractor (for now).
May 22nd, 2008 at 11:52 pm
that is funny because i just got offered a contracting job as some sort of client manager with verizon supporting fiber customers.
only fiber customers though, copper customers can suck it.
May 22nd, 2008 at 11:52 pm
i passed on it.
June 10th, 2008 at 8:22 pm
Come on now contractor- vz employees badmouthing the contractors is why customers hated them ?? Could it possibly been the word of mouth about the shitty ass work that 75% of them performed.
June 10th, 2008 at 8:51 pm
Look at CMPS results for all groups (employee and contractor) from Jully 11 2006 and you tell me who performed “shitty ass work”. The contractor’s numbers for quality and quantity has far surpassed that of the in house techs. As far as your question/suggestion … who knows and who cares. According to customers themselves, customers can not stand the “shitty ass work” customer support was providing (or not providing) and that is completely internal with no contractors. By the way, Chris, if you look at the results of contractors versus in house techs from the begining of video firing up in Suncoast, TpaN, TpaS, and Southern , I feel that you may want to touch up your statement a little. Numbers don’t lie
June 10th, 2008 at 8:52 pm
oh and by the way … yes, word of mouth … but guess who’s words and who’s mouths!
June 26th, 2008 at 5:09 pm
whats funny is my husband is a fios installer in maryland and weve been trying to get him trasnfered to FL to install there and we keep getting told there not enough work to hire him on…..
July 8th, 2008 at 9:41 am
justin=contractor