Hi, New to the board and just had a question...

[Stevenikkij]

I just had the FIOS Triple play installed on 6/17. So far so good.

Just wondering after reading so many negative comments on these forums, does anyone have anything positive to say about FIOS?

All the comments I have about billing and customer service issues has me thinking I may have made a bad decision.

Thanks

Steve

[lasagna]

The unfortunate thing about forums is that people without problems rarely take time to come here and say "good" things.    Ask yourself, would you?   I'm sure if you look at the number of people here who are having problems and compare that number to the overall number of users on FiOS, it would be a small percentage.  So, you do indeed get a jaded view about the service.   Now there will be folks who will take this opportunity to hijack this thread and slam Verizon -- most likely because they are presently a dissatisfied customer who is here because they are seeking resolution to a problem.  But, there are those of us who hang out here who do so just because we like helping people with their technical problems for whatever warped reason we might have for doing so.

Anyhow, I've been a customer of FiOS for over two years.  I switched to them from Comcast after what at that time was their latest round of price increases.   I didn't do so out of spite, but in fact did a price comparison.   When FiOS was initially available in my neighborhood, it wasn't financially compelling to make a switch -- but when I did my evaluation after cable did their pricing changes, I came out ahead to the tune of over $20/month lower cost.

Pricing has crept up a bit on the Verizon side in that timeframe and that gap has narrowed somewhat, but it''s also not an apples to apples comparison for me so I have to factor that in.

• Internet -- love FiOS.  35/35 service and I often get better than yet.   Yes, there is the occasional problem, but they usually get cleared up within a few hours.  Far better than anything cable has to offer in my area.

• TV -- comparable channel package (Ultimate) to cable.  Bundling is a bit clumsy and I'd like to see more options here especially since I'm not a sports junky (I have a few sports I like to follow -- like college football and such -- but the plethora of additional channels is really wasted money for me but there's not easy way to ditch those I don't need).  Picture quality -- far superior to cable.  All digital.  At the time I made the switch, Comcast was still transmitting a lot of their channels analog and I frequently had signal quality issues plus they were using heavy compression on their HD signals.   This may have changed since with the whole digital TV conversion, but at the time -- picture quality was stellar on FiOS and still is.

• Phone -- I don't use phone service from Verizon (and wouldn't from Comcast either).   Both of these offerings are comparible, but neither company in my opinion has figure out how to deliver them cost effectively.  I use an internet based VoIP provider at about 1/5 the cost of the additional monthly cost of either the Verizon or Comcast offerings with free long distance to anywhere in the US/Canada and competitive rates elsewhere.

• Reliability -- rock solid.  With the exception of some of the major thunderstorms that came thru (with tornado's in them) that took down power as well, I think I can only recall one other occasion of an outage and it was resolved in a couple of hours.  Maybe I've been lucky -- knock on wood.

• Customer Service -- Verizon needs to work on this.  I feel for their front line support people -- there are a lot of people who think they are "experts" when they really are novices or don't understand how the Internet works who I'm sure call every day -- and sorting them out from those with real problems can be difficult.  However, it is frustrating to deal with some of their front line folks who seem to only be able to work from a script rather than apply a little intelligence to the conversation to help expedite resolution.  It's hit or miss however -- I've had folks who quickly got to where I was at when calling in a problem or question and got me to expert resources quickly and I've had folks where I simply said "oops sorry, someone's at the door, I'll call back later" and hungup and called back in order to get a different representative.   This is Verizon's biggest area for an opportunity for improvement in my opinion.

In summary, I am a happy customer at the moment.   I'd always like to see lower rates, higher speeds, and more choices -- but compared to the other other offerings in my area for service, FiOS is presently the leader.  I recommend them to my neighbors whenever I'm asked. 

So, welcome.  I hope your experience is as good as mine so far has been.

[Justin46]

Steve,

Keep in mind that there are millions of FiOS users (I think there are about 3.5 million TV STBs installed in ???? customers, and 4 million or so internet users), and what you see here and perhaps on other forums is a very, very, very small portion of the users. Most people are extremely quick to complain and very slow to compliment, if they will do it at all. If you look at any survey of cable, satellite, and FiOS customers, FiOS comes out on top pretty much every time, in every area except maybe Customer Support.

Now, sure, I will say lots positive. I have had FiOS TV, internet, and phone for almost 6 years now, installed in Sept. 2005 to replace Charter Cable TV and internet service and kept my Verizon phone service. My experience:

1) TV? Great picture, lots of channels (but now missing a few that some would like), extremely reliable, I am not aware of any general failures in my 5+ years, although occasionally a channel or two will drop out or have other issues, very reliable STBs (one hardware failure in 3 STBs in almost 6 years and very few software bugs), great new features coming soon in the new 1.9A level of the IMG.

2) Internet? Great service, I have 25/15 service in my bundle, when I do a speed test on any number of different test sites I typically get 30/24, again very reliable (unlike the internet service from Charter).

3) Phone? It just works, very reliably, I still have POTS, just now via fiber instead of copper, would like to convert to Verizon Digital Voice sometime soon.

4) Customer Service? Probably the weakest link for Verizon. Very confusing Billing, at least until your account settles down (takes a few months after pretty much any change, your best bet is to get what you want up front and make as few changes as you can). Tech Support can be hit or miss, I have had excellent support, especially the techs who have been onsite, and I have had support that I had to call back in and complain about. But then again, the service has been so reliable for me that I had had to call in very rarely, mostly in the first few months 6 years ago when Verizon set up my email account incorrectly and it took quite a while to get it fixed. For some reason it appears to me that some customers call in for almost every little thing; this causes long waits for a live agent for themselves and others, and generally results in poor satisfaction. I encourage you to just go with the flow; if something seems not quite right, wait a little while to see if it goes away by itself instead of picking up the phone immediately, maybe try Live Chat and/or some of the self-help tools Verizon now has, and consider coming here to ask about your issue first, there are a number of great people here who will try to help.

The net is, I am a pretty happy customer with almost 6 years of use, I continually get offers from Charter Cable and the satellite companies, and I see absolutely no reason to switch, at least for now. But I always intend to keep my options open, you never know what might happen tomorrow or the next day.

Hope this helps. If you do experience any problems, for other than broken hardware I encourage you to come to the Forums first and search then ask if not found, I think you will be happy you chose FiOS.

__________________________________
Justin
FiOS TV, Internet, and phone user
QIP7232, IMG 1.8, Build 02.54
Keller, TX 76248

[Stevenikkij]

Thanks for the replies Jason and lasagna. I think it is the billing/customer service that concerns me more than anything. After reading how folks will have random charges show up from month to month has me terrified. I will take the wait and see approach. I opted for the month to month so I am not locked in to a contract and will go back to Directv if I have to.

I have been impressed so far I must say. I have the 35/35 plan and consistently get 44/42 so that has been great and the HD channels have been awesome.

[Justin46]

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@Stevenikkij wrote:

Thanks for the replies Jason and lasagna. I think it is the billing/customer service that concerns me more than anything. After reading how folks will have random charges show up from month to month has me terrified. I will take the wait and see approach. I opted for the month to month so I am not locked in to a contract and will go back to Directv if I have to.

I have been impressed so far I must say. I have the 35/35 plan and consistently get 44/42 so that has been great and the HD channels have been awesome.

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Notice that he and I replied within about 5 minutes of each other, so our opinions really are independent

As to the specific billing issues you mentioned, my take on that is that everybody should always, always, always check their bill every month. Apparently lots of people do not, then they find that stuff on it months later and want credit, and are unhappy when they have to fight to get it.

My suggestions are:

1) As I said in my first post, pick the services you want, and stick with them, don't go makes changes all the time. Any time you make any changes to your account you open yourself up to errors (accidental or some people would say intentional).

2) Stick with paper billing. When it comes, read it, and do this each and every month. If anything is out of line, call immediately, don't wait.

3) Do not use Veizon auto-pay. While it may work ok for some or many, I think it just makes it too easy to let checking the bill slide.

4) Pay via the web if you want (I do), but do it yourself each month. I have a cheat sheet for all of my utilities, with estimated dates due, and I check off each bill as I pay it. I also create a PDF of each payment confirmation web page and save it in a specific folder. And for all who offer it (Verizon does), I opt for an email confirmation. I know some people will call me paranoid or over cautious, but you know what, I have never had an error on a bill that I could not get corrected since I started this, from Verizon or any other company that I pay via the web.

5) There are some charges that might appear on your bill that Verizon has no choice but to include. There are companies that our great federal government requires regulated utilities like Verizon to include automatically. It generally is easy to get the entries removed, but if it happens you will need to contact both Verizon and the company doing the billing. If you will search here you should be able to find multiple threads on this that contain links to the federal websites. And you should have the option to call Verizon and request that they not allow such billing on your account.

6) As to month to month, obviously your choice. But you are almost certainly costing yourself money over worries that something may  happen (probably will not) on your billing. If I were you I would at least see what a bundle would do cost-wise.

Anyway, welcome to FiOS....

__________________________________
Justin
FiOS TV, Internet, and phone user
QIP7232, IMG 1.8, Build 02.54
Keller, TX 76248

[lasagna]

So a couple words of advice on the billing ...

1. Your first two or three months will take a bit to settle down.  People are often confused by their first bill because it contains charges for the "partial" month of your billing cycle PLUS your first full month's service which makes things look much more expensive.  Month two tends to switch the opposite way a bit as any rebates and other things come into play, and finally by month three things settle down.

2. By the time you reach month three, you're often reaching the end of your free trial offers.  First, don't forget to call in and cancel them if you don't want them a least a few days in advance.  Second, this will cause more bill weirdness as they credit out and add in those services you decide to keep (partial month stuff again).

3. Verizon's bill also tends to show all services at their "full" price and then credits out the "packages" to bring the final cost down to the proper value.    Sometimes this is split across different services (so part comes off the internet, part off the TV, etc.).  This can be quite confusing -- but if you pull out the calculator and run the numbers it works out.

4. On occasion when you're calling in to make a change to services, things get "added" that you didn't request.  I don't think this is intentional, I think it's the service representative accidentally forgetting to clear a checkbox as they reprovision your service -or- in many cases offering you a free trial in passing but that not being entirely clear to you at the time.  It seems to me for whatever reason that when you make a change it's not simply adding/deleting an item on a screen, but essentially starting over from scratch and setting you up again ... probably not right, but it seems that way as I listen to the agent implement the change.  Always have them repeat back to you exactly what they have provisioned for your account AND quote you the exact amount it's showing as being the monthly total cost.  If it's not what you expect, don't hang up until it matches your expectations.    Oh yeah, if you're on a plan which has a one or two year committment -- or if you're on a month to month -- make sure you confirm what the account says are your new terms.  Make sure by makng the changes, they didn't create a new package with a new or different terms and forget to reset the termination date back to your original value.  Easy thing to overlook -- pain in the neck to fix if you don't catch until a few months down the road.

5. Mid-month changes will sometimes show services which you didn't change showing up as being "cancelled" on the date you made the other changes followed by a full month charge for that service followed by a partial month credit for service.  Sounds weird, but if you add all the numbers together it should work out to the regular monthly cost.  Best I can figure is that this is the result of the agent "repackaging" your service

Billing is definitely the most confusing of the bunch.   However, I can say that I rarely make changes to my packages (some people seem to make changes every month for some reason) ... in the several years I've been a customer, after things settled down from the initial change -- the bill is the same month after month after month -- and nothing magically "appears" that couldn't be directly traced to the date that I made some other change on the account.

[lasagna]

wow ... six minutes this time.  Get outta my head will ya Justin!

[Stevenikkij]

Thanks again guys. @ Justin, sorry for calling you Jason. I have printed your replies and will keep them as best practices.

For Justin, now I am questioning whether or not I did a 2 year contract or month to month. Is there somewhere on the My Verizon page that I can tell? I did receive a bunch of promotions when signing up so is it safe to assume I did the 2 year contract? I can't remember.

Steve

[Justin46]

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@lasagna wrote:

wow ... six minutes this time.  Get outta my head will ya Justin!

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Yeah, but this time I beat you to it , last time you beat me

[Stevenikkij]

After asking the question Justin I clicked Account at the top and it took me to the Account Overview screen which now gives more detail on my plan then it did before. Something must have updated.

Under FIOS TV, it says My agreement with the word agreement being a hyperlink. I clicked it and it states the following

Minimum term commitment of 24 months applies. If you cancel any of your services before completing your minimum term, an early termination fee will apply and you will no longer receive the bundle discount on any remaining services. 24-month plans are subject to an early termination fee of up to $230. I understand that once my bundled services are installed, I have a 30 day period to cancel without an early termination fee.

I take this to mean that I did in fact opt for the 2 year commitment.

Do you see the same under your account?

Steve