Dry Loop DSL slow-down during prime time, Long Beach, CA

[lgusti]

Smith, 

Thank you for all your help.

I decided to kill my Verizon DSL account.

I had enough working with all those incompetent India based phone support that keep repeting the same script.

When you asked for escalation, the level 2 tier told me they can help me if I pay $150. No thank you.

I signed up with Charter internet and now getting speed up to 36Mbps download and 4Mbps upload for $39.99 per month.

I keep testing it for the past 3 days and it has been consistent, even during peak hours.

It's cheaper than my Verizon DSL that promise 15Mbps and 1Mpbs upload for $44.95

For the record, I have never reached speed higher than 9-10Mbps download ever.

And all this congestion issue during prime time hour at night is killing me.

Verizon need to deal with all this congestion issue and not oversell their DSL if they can't deliver.

[smith6612]

Understandable, and I do agree they need to do something about the congestion. The DSL network still has some life in it and it needs to be treated as such. Problem is no one wants to spend the money to fix it up and improve it (*cough*OC12s being demuxed to T3*cough*)or for that matter, upgrade the software on the gear to make it cope better with provisioning past 3Mbps (*cough*ADTRAN TA5000*cough*Litespan*cough*). That's understandable, but FiOS isn't exactly going anywhere either at the moment which is sad. I recently re-obtained communications with my Verizon contact who fixes these issues constantly for people so if the account was still active I'd send you to him. Either way, hope Comcast keeps delivering what you're getting, and I hope they finally back off of their 250GB/m limit on Residential accounts once they complete DOCSIS 3.0 upgrades.

An employee at the company I work at last night seemed pretty speachless while I was talking with him while servicing his computer. Knowledgable dude and we spoke back and fourth about IT and marketing related discussions, but when I explained the nonsense I see in Internet connections and companies these days he had very few words to say. Struggled to find something to say and I wasn't being technical either. The key words I put out verbatem were:  "In order to retain customers, you must invest. Problem is, no one seems to want to do that and instead wishes to milk what they have. Milking can only go so far, and when it hits a limit, the milk goes stale and competition swoops in as a hero. This is something every company needs to do, no matter if it's Verizon, Comcast, AT&T, Time Warner, Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Apple, whoever or if there is a recession or angry investors breathing down your neck. Data caps are not the answer, and not making full use of your investments is also not an answer." I then began to explain what I truly meant as we waited for his computer to boot back up after service, and that went exactly like this: "So, imagine I was working for company XYZ. I receive an amount of money from this company for being here and doing a job, paid for by investor money and revenue earned for work performed by the company. Now, I could take that money and just get your system back up and running, or I could do what I just did, went the extra mile, worked an investment in me as an employee for the betterment of the company, and have nothing extra in return but a thank you. Maybe it takes an investment towards one project farther than an investor or the company would like, however is he investing in the company just for the money or is he investing in the company as he should for the well-being of the company and is the company investing in me just to keep me as a statistic or to keep me as someone worthwhile, expecting it to live on and use all assets to maximum capability and efficiency. Over time, this practice is in hope to boost investment in the company and also improve revenue flow as consumers and investors see that we're not in it to be a business, we're in it because we care and wish to treat others as family like we employees do to ourselves." As I said that, the issue I was working on with his computer was not only repaired, his system overall was performing far better than he has ever seen it in the few years he had it. I got nothing more than a Thank You and a "Thanks for teaching me XYZ," and went on to my next job.

[lgusti]

Oh Smitty, that's just another day as an IT guy....

I lost count how many time that i have to spent company hour trying to fix someone else personal laptop that they dont even bother to put a password on.

Sometime you got a Cupcake as a thank you, other time you just got a thank you and that's it. On some occassion you got some people that will blame you the next time they had their issue with the laptop. 

Verizon promise me FIOS  when i moved in to Long Beach back in 2008, it's 2012 now and I still havent been able to get FIOS.

Anyhow, I do appreciate your help. Glad that you're willing to spend your time to help others.

[smith6612]

Of course 🙂 . Stuff like this should also be another day for Verizon but it seems they do their days differently, if you see where I'm touching base on. I don't fix Personal machines except on my own time outside of work, and fortunately no one at work does bring in a personal machine to request help. They leave me a note to call them at X time and it's often just something I do on the aside as a small consulting/repair/build hobby I have.

I was promised FiOS in 2007/2008 when they were going crazy with FiOS Expansion here. They were wiring up entire areas within a month and bringing them online as they wired up. I'd have it by now if expansion didn't grind to a screaching halt. It looks like I may be getting it this summer since FiOS gear is up on the poles nearby me, but even this is up in the air. They've taken a year to even build a skeleton plant and place the Fiber Distribution Hubs, our town has no TV agreement, our CO is already serving FiOS to the other half of the CO's service area, we've got a lot of new neighborhoods near me with maybe another one going in, but I've also spoken with Verizon techs who have stated it may only be for Greenlit Developments (New), may be due to Garage cleanout day (They have to clean out the garage and have no choice BUT to hang it in hopes of making use of it), or they may be placing it but throwing us onto the LTE product Verizon Wireless has, or if it does turn out my way we get GPON/XGPON FiOS and I'll gladly turn off the DSL for FiOS.