FIOS Technical Support not up to the task
sam_veriz
Newbie

I have been a happy customer of Verizon (Internet, phone and TV) for the last three years. FIOS has been great but what I have seen is when it breaks, support team is unable to fix it in a timely manner. I have been chasing them for last few days but they make it so difficult to reach them for follow up investigation. Every call, you have to start from scratch and end up without any ETA for resolution or next steps with a clear timeline. They expect customer to be at their mercy.

I am getting a dismal 0.04mbps upload when I should get 5 mbps per SLA. I am unable to work due to this. I will be happy if 1 Mbps upload is available and not really worried about having 5 Mbps upload speed.

http://www.speedtest.net/result/911217613.png

I would now reconsider having alternate service provider, if Verizon cannot address this real quick. At $150 a month,  I can get two broadband internet connections (cable/wireless). I just watch very limited TV that I can subscribe channel of my choice very cheap than sticking with Verizon. With $24 Vonage and $9 Netflix, Verizon would loose customers faster if they do not make Technical Support easily accessible on follow ups on an ongoing issue and show they are committed to resolve the issue with a sense of urgency. FIOS performance and availability kept me as a subscriber of the bundle service and it looks like that is not the case anymore. I had similar suport experience in the past and thought it was just an isolated case and now understand it is rather a systemic issue.

0 Likes
Re: FIOS Technical Support not up to the task
lasagna
Community Leader
Community Leader

That's definitely not normal ...

Let's see if we can figure out if it's in the Verizon cloud somewhere or something more local.   The fact that you're getting good downstream numbers and that the upstream number is so out of whack would seem to imply it might be something local on your machine or network that's causing the issue (both numbers being bad being a good indicator that it's something in the connection to your house and/or high latency numbers on traceroutes and pings).

First, do you happen to have another machine which you can use to try a similar test from?    I've seen some local antivirus and other stuff get in the way of the upload (it's doing a scan of the data stream looking for information that might be leaking out like passwords or credit card numbers, etc.) and this can make the numbers look artificially low (it's called data trickling -- it let's data flow very slowly while it scans the information and then when it's done it lets it all loose at once -- side effect is that it completely throws off measurements like this).

Can you do a ping / traceroute to a well known site like www.google.com and post the results?

tracert www.google.com

ping www.google.com

ping -l 1300 -f www.google.com

ping -l 1472 -f www.google.com

Can you do the speed test against another speed test site?  If you like Speedtest ... try one or more alternate server locations.    Also do a test using one of speed test tools on www.dslreports.com -- these us different engines to do the testing.

Other thoughts on some things to try while folks here look at the numbers when you post them:

1. Did you try power cycling both router and the ONT?   And then the PC?   Clean out any cobwebs just in case something got confused by a power hit or something.   To reset the ONT, unplug the battery from the battery backup unit and then unplug the unit itself and wait about 60 seconds before reversing the process.   (so, pc off, router off, ont reboot, wait for a minute or so, router on, wait for good network lights, pc on).

2. Can you temporarily disable your anti-virus / scanning software on the PC and run just the speed test?  (re-enable immediately after done)

3. Wireless or Hardwired?   If not hardwired, can you get connected directly to the router and run the tests above.

This should give everyone some info to chew and make some further suggestions.

2.