Complaint Rating:

Company information:
Verizon FIOS
Arkansas
United States
www.verizon.com

I will start off by saying that I have seen first hand the unorganized mess that Verizon calls "Fios". This will be long, but believe me, it is very factual and worth reading if you are considering Fios or already have it. First off, Verizon hires 3rd party workers to do their installs. They cause tons of damage to homes and property and never want to take responsibility for it. These "technicians" are not licensed to do the work they are doing. Verizons equipment is extremely unreliable. The set top boxes for Fios TV are complete junk. They have more problems with pixelation, loss of the TV guide, and DVR's going bad then any other company I have ever seen. Verizon uses the existing coax cabling within your house for their service. The problem is, the signal coming in from their fiber box is much hotter than a signal coming from the cable company or other providers. This causes the pixelation problems. When this problem occurs, they want to charge you $95 per coax cable run to replace them. This is not legal! Once they put their signal on those lines, the lines become their responsibility to not have signal loss. The remote controls they offer are garbage and they will charge you to replace them when they break. The "new" TV guide that Verizon has released is extremely un-friendly to any user of it. It is archaic and extremely hard to use. If you have to reset the box, which you will do at least once a week, you will lose all of your settings, favorites etc... from within the guide. The browse by page function does not work in the guide. You have to go channel by channel. You might as well not have a guide at this point. When it comes to Fios Internet, there are many problems here as well. Verizon uses the coax cable in your house for the internet as well. They run a line to a splitter and to your broadband router. This method is proprietary and does not allow you to ever get a different router. Using this "MoCA" technology also does not allow VPN connections. VPN's need a constant streaming of bits for security. MoCA compresses these into blocks of bits and sends them sporadically. Therefore, your VPN will never connect due to the security timing out while trying to establish the secure connection. The only way to fix this is to have Verizon change out your cable run from coax to Ethernet from the fiber box. And for this they will want to charge you. The router they provide (ActionTec MI424WR) is complete junk. They only support basic connectivity on this router. The router is not compatible with any gaming consoles via wireless connection (PS3, XBox 360, Nintendo Wii, PSP etc...). You can open up all the ports that you want and it still wont work. For the third piece of trash service, the phone over fiber, again there are numerous issues. Once you get Fios, your copper lines (standard phone lines or POTS) are decommissioned. Verizon will not switch you back to copper once you have moved to Fios. The phone over the fiber line is incredibly unreliable. It constantly drops, has noise on the line, loses dial tone completely and worst of all, if you lose power and the battery backup on the fiber box dies, you have no phone. Not true with good old copper lines. The battery backup on the fiber unit is supposed to last 8 hours. Good luck getting 1 hour out of it. And when the battery within that unit dies, good luck getting it replaced. Verizon will charge you for a replacement after one year. Now that you know about the services themselves, now listen about the customer service. If you call to get help, you will be on hold anywhere from 2 minutes to 4 hours. Usually the ladder of the time frame. Once you get a hold of someone, it might not be the right person and you may start the agonizing process of being transferred around. Expect to spend half of your day on the phone for the majority of times that you call for support. Once you get through this headache, if you schedule for a technician to come out for repair, beware of what they tell you for time frames. They will tell you between the hours of so and so which means absolutely nothing. If the tech finishes a job early or late, he may arrive 4 hours early or 4 hours late. You basically have to take the whole day off of work and sit and wait. Then you may be part of the majority where the technician doesn't show at all. No phone call, no nothing! You waste your whole day and lose pay for the day for nothing. This may happen one time or it may happen 3-4 times before you actually see a technician. Believe me, this does happen! And more often then it should. And if you try to get some kind of credit for the lost day of pay, they will give you a measly $50 credit. Even if you have waited for a tech numerous times where they haven't shown up. Once the tech does arrive, its a crap shoot. He could be a great tech or someone who has no knowledge of how to troubleshoot or install this equipment. You may have more of a mess after he leaves than originally reported before he arrived. All in all, when it comes to their customer service, you will feel like you are constantly chasing them trying to get answers, trying to get service and you will get nothing but the run around. I hope this explanation is useful to many who are considering this terrible service. If you value your time and hard earned money, you should avoid this service at all costs. Stick with the guys who at least have reliable service and good techs available.