Verizon Phone Service

[Peter Stahl]

This is a rant and a question. My wife refuses to get rid of the land line and lately it's not working correctly. We can call out with it but when someone tries to call you get a 1/2 a ring then it goes dead. We called for service and all you get is a automated service so we make a appointment. Get a call today, service guy called said oh I guess your phone is working now! I said hold on, not working right and tell him the problem. He says it's Voice Mail and I say we don't have it. He says we do but will remove it and everything will be fine now. So I hang up try it with my cell and it seems to be ok. I get to work later and the same problem again. My wife calls 1800VeRIZON and gets a human, this is their ordering extension. Woman that answers says the Voice Mail is disconnected but to get our phone fixed we need another appointment now, they'll get to use Monday. It's not our phones, I went out the box on the side of the house, opened the little door up where the line connect and plugged in a phone, still works the same, can call out but not in. Any phone guys out there? Anyone ever had this happen? The other thing is I was talking to my wife when He was trying to get through and switched over to him which might me different then trying to call directly. What happen to the quick repair service the phone company used to have???

[Jim Becker]

Hmm....from a provisioning point of view, if they turned off the voice mail (you may have gotten that with one of the Freedom bundles) but didn't also turn off the forwarding features that are used for the voice mail to work, it may account for the short ring and call disappearing on incoming calls. My general sense is that this is a provisioning issue, especially since you have the same experience when you plug directly into the NID (the box on your house) as long as you also disconnected your house wiring by unplugging the lead before plugging your phone in to do your test. It "could" be a wiring issue, however...Murphy's Law is like that!

And yes, if you flipped over to the technican's call from call waiting, that's can absolutely be a different situation, although somewhat strange if it's a problem with forwarding.

[Gordon Harner]

prompt and quality field service from verizon is as extinct as the dodo bird.

In my part of north jersey it often takes weeks to get service. My ILs living in the same town as wife andI needed several techs to figure out a problem with their line. On my line every time one of the bozo techs does work in the neighborhood he screws up our line. Getting it fixed usually takes more than a weekIt sure isn't the same as the old Bell system. BTW, verizon is headquatered about 2 miles away!

[Peter Stahl]

Hmm....from a provisioning point of view, if they turned off the voice mail (you may have gotten that with one of the Freedom bundles) but didn't also turn off the forwarding features that are used for the voice mail to work, it may account for the short ring and call disappearing on incoming calls. My general sense is that this is a provisioning issue, especially since you have the same experience when you plug directly into the NID (the box on your house) as long as you also disconnected your house wiring by unplugging the lead before plugging your phone in to do your test. It "could" be a wiring issue, however...Murphy's Law is like that!

And yes, if you flipped over to the technican's call from call waiting, that's can absolutely be a different situation, although somewhat strange if it's a problem with forwarding.

Jim,

I had my wife call me at work from the house phone then she called the house phone and it rang fine. She then clicked over to the cell phone call from the house phone. I tried calling the house after this test, one ring and disconnected. What kind of test should I try to determine if it's the house or Ma Bell? Should I disconnect all the phones then try the NID? I thought opening the NID door/cover disconnected it from the house?

[Jeffrey Makiel]

My Verizon phone line is giving me a lot of trouble again. This is the fourth time this year. The problem is always outside my home and is usually a quarter mile away (which is about a hundred homes away). Go figure.

I believe that Verizon may not care much about the old equipment and is looking for FiOS to be the solution. Problem is, I need to have a phone in the mean time.

Good luck, Jeff :)

[Matt Meiser]

Don't EVEN get me started on Verizon. I'd dump them in a nanosecond if I could!

- The first spring after we moved in our home line had noise so bad that it was unusable at times. You literally could not hear a word. It was obviously affected by rain and within a day or two would dry out and work OK. It took them months to fix it and only after I worked my way up the chain of supervisors far enough that I got a personal phone call from the maintenance supervisor in our area and his personal cell phone number so they could do an emergency dispatch when it was actually occurring. Otherwise it would be categorized as non-critical and they wouldn't get to us for several days and by then it would be dried out.
- In the process of dealing with the above, I learned that 1 of the 6 miles of cable between my house and the CO was installed in the 50's. The repair guy who came out one of the times claims that it literally has more black plastic and electrical tape for jacket than original jacket. But Verizon won't authorize replacement because it isn't cost-effective. There's another area where the cable is split open and all the individual wires are hanging out like spaghetti. Its been that way for a couple years now.
- Verizon has NO plans to upgrade the equipment and wiring in my exchange to support most of my township getting DSL service according to the local repair people. They were supposedly forced by the FCC to install a DSL capable switch but the wiring is so bad that apparently they can't get DSL out to what they would consider a normal distance. And supposedly the remote switches that serve some of the far corners of the township aren't DSL capable and won't be because what they did meets the FCC mandate. They even replaced one of those switches because it was totaled by a car accident.
- When they installed my next door neighbor's phone line from the pole in my yard I was in the process of ripping out about an acre of brush and regrading the area. This was very obvious since I had piles of brush and piles of dirt all around. They buried the line through the mess about 2-6" deep. Then they gave me a hard time when I pulled it up with my box blade about a week later and ripped it off it from the pole. My neighbors weren't home so I called it in and service gave me a hard time because I didn't know my neighbors' phone number or address (this was only a few weeks after they moved in.) They didn't want to take the report because I didn't have exact info. They knew my address and it shouldn't have been hard to look up the next higher odd numbered address on my road. Finally they just filed it under my phone number but I had to argue with them to do it. They just wanted to wait until my neighbors got home. Then the service guy who came out started really giving me a hard time about damaging their lines, how much they were going to charge me, etc. It only stopped when I asked what the depth standard was and asked how it would have been possible for me to hit it if it had been buried that deep? Then I watched him bury the part right next to the pole by kicking some dirt over it with his boot.
- When I got a second line for my home office I told them I needed the billing separate because I expense the second line. They didn't want to do that and promised that it would be clearly broken out on the bill what charges were for what line. But of course they weren't. All taxes and fees were lumped together and I had to go through the bill and manually add up the rest of the itemized charges after figuing out which one was for what line. They were all mixed together. First they couldn't tell me exactly how the fees were divided. Then it took months and over a 1/2 dozen long phone calls to get it straightened out. BTW, on my Sprint cell bill, they print a box that shows the phone number and what amount of the bill is a result of that line.
- When they did straighten it out, I got my first separated bill, it was for over $400. In the process of straightening it out, they removed the long distance service my employer put on the line and put on the standard service that no one in their right mind would take. Several more long phone calls to fix that. I told them they might as well write the long distance charges off since they didn't have my permission to remove the service that was on there and I wasn't paying highway robbery rates for their mistake. To their credit, they didn't argue with that and did it right away.
- Our whole exchange was without service for almost 24 hours a couple months ago due to "technical difficulty". Since they never would say, I would assume it has to do with the junky wire/equipment.
- My office line has voicemail and caller ID so I've been offered this online service where I can get my voicemail in my email which would be awesome when I'm travelling. But now I'm signed up and when I log in it says I don't have voicemail. But I clearly do. I've tried calling support twice. The first time they weren't open, the second I hung up after waiting 15 minutes.
- I inquired with their business services group about getting a T1 line since I can't get DSL. I was told that they typically charge in the $300 range which I could make work because I could move both phone lines to VOIP and possibly give a couple neighbor's wireless access for $20/mo or something like that to help cover the costs. Then when I actually got a quote it was over $800. Not because of my exact location, but that's what they charge in this region. My brother works at the HQ of a Catholic religious order in the next county over and they are part of a buying co-op that can normally get T1's in the $200-300 range from AT&T but they have to pay $800 too. If they went through the co-op it would have been over $1000 because of what it would cost for AT&T to lease the line from Verizon and resell it. And they are in a decent size city. They are dropping their T1 and going to redundant buisiness cable lines from Comcast with a failover router and saving several hundred dollars a month.
- My monthly phone bill for my office line is almost $55. Most people I talk to at work pay at least $10 less. I got our barely-used home line down to $35 by abandoning all features and going to a limited plan where we get charged for more than 100 calls. At our old house or phone bill was something like $24 to start. I think it went up to $28 when they expanded the local call area to include most of the county. There we had a company called Deerfield Farmers Telephone. When we needed off-hours service we called the pager for the on-call guy who came right out. They also provided high speed internet and cable on their all-digital, fiber-to-the-premises network. When I had to use dialup there (my employer at the time didn't have VPN yet so we had to dial in to get on the office network), I'd consistently get 53K connections. There was NO noise on that network. And our total bill for all three services was about $100/mo. They are now a competitive local exchange carrier for Verizon and have already wired (glassed?) two areas. Last I checked they haven't done any engineering for our area but eventually hopefully it will happen. I'll switch the day they light it up.

I HATE Verizon!

BTW, I heard a story on the radio about how the FCC wants to rework the Universal Service Charge or whatever its called and start using it to reward broadband providers for providing service in underserved rural areas. The large companies like AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon are opposed. I suspect Deerfield Farmers Telephone would love to get some of that money to expand their network. I'll be writing my Senator and representative in support of that.

[Tom Godley]

At my house in southern NJ it is the same - The lines always have some sort of noise on them - getting louder as the moisture rises!

I was also informed -- by the lineman - that they are only authorized to "patch" the lines.

We now have FIOS in the area -- I am about to make the switch to FIOS from Comcast in that location.


I have the same problems with Comcast - only worse-!! The cable system dates from the mid 60's and suffers from the same problems.

[Jim Becker]

Peter, unless you have some kind of NID I'm not familiar with, merely opening the door does not disconnect the house's internal wiring. There should be a modular plug that jumps between the telco side and the premise side that you can use to disconnect the house wiring and then plug in a phone to test right at the NID.

[Joe Pelonio]

I had a similar experience with my business line a couple of years ago. It turned out that while I had Qwest service the lines were owned by Verizon.
It was an intermittent problem, and was hard to get them out at a time when the line was acting up. Then I saw a pattern related to the weather, heavy rain would knock it out. Eventually the 4th guy sent out found as junction box that was underground and had not been waterproofed, so was shorting out when it filled with runoff water.

[Matt Meiser]

Peter, unless you have some kind of NID I'm not familiar with, merely opening the door does not disconnect the house's internal wiring. There should be a modular plug that jumps between the telco side and the premise side that you can use to disconnect the house wiring and then plug in a phone to test right at the NID.

Our new one that supports 2 lines has little levers you flip kind of like a switch. Hard to explain, but there's no jumper wire that looks like a phone cord like the old one. When you flip the lever, it exposes the test jack. At least on the house side, it is apparently designed to be tool-less. My CAT5 cables attach to terminals kind of like a punchdown block, but the levers do the punching the first time you flip them.

[Peter Stahl]

Thanks for all the replies so far. I'm in a rain delay. It's pouring out right now so I'll try and physically disconnect it when I get a chance.

[Chuck Wintle]

Thanks for all the replies so far. I'm in a rain delay. It's pouring out right now so I'll try and physically disconnect it when I get a chance.

Peter,
A test I saw the repair person do for a faulty wiring system was to disconnect the lines from the pole to the house at the box on the outside wall. He then used an ohmmeter to check the impedance of the line. It should read open with no phones connected.

[Peter Stahl]

Got another repair man on Thursday. He said when He tried it that it rang off the hook after he replaced a blown protector fuse. I had a dial tone like before so I called my own number to see if it would get to the answering machine which would take 4 rings but I only got 1-1/2 this time, one better than before. Called the number the repair man left, he called it and got same results as I got. He had also changed out the NID Jim mentioned and when He came back He changed it again. Still not working right He went off to check my card He said we had now as were computerized for the upgrade. He came back and said He switched me to a different pair of wires and someone had to move us physically and it may not get done Thursday but they would do it Friday. Nothing all day until later Friday evening. If I call my number it does ring and ring and I get DSL now but no dial tone. Could the wires be backwards at the NID keeping the phone from getting a dial tone but letting the data get though for the DSL?

[John Shuk]

You likely have a high resistant short which usually occurs in peoples equipment. Not always but usually. DSL can work through a short circuit which explains why you can use it while talking on the phone. polarity really doesn't matter. You need to ask the next person there to look at all of your extensions and phones with a meter.

[Peter Stahl]

You likely have a high resistant short which usually occurs in peoples equipment. Not always but usually. DSL can work through a short circuit which explains why you can use it while talking on the phone. polarity really doesn't matter. You need to ask the next person there to look at all of your extensions and phones with a meter.

Not my equipment. Last repairman did something because it's still dead. Repairman that came today said he couldn't fix it, said it's a problem with the central office. Good thing I don't need my phone for work. My wife went to the local Verizon Wireless Office about 2 miles away and they said their fax line has been broke for about a month.

[Peter Stahl]

Finally got my phone service back on Monday. Got a call at about 4:30 that said my service was fixed at 11:30 AM. Didn't say what it was just a automated message. I guess using a automated message you can't yell at them huh. Still working after 4 days!