Ah, Verizon. The company we love to hate.
I’ve had Verizon DSL for near on 9 years now. I got it when I lived in Morningside Heights and they first started offering it in NYC, then moved the service to Brooklyn when I graduated from school, then moved it to Astoria when I bought my house. Throughout that time I’ve had long bouts of good service followed by long (but shorter) bouts of bad service. This last long bout (for poor internet service that is) has lasted about a month. Every couple of days my download speed – which should be 3mb / sec down falls to, oh, 3KB / sec and stays that way for several hours, or days, depending on how long it takes me to get through the myriad of drones Verizon has manning their tech support lines and convincing them that the problem isn’t the fact that I’m not running virus protection, but that they have a problem in their switch. In the past month I’ve spoken to support people in India, Mexico, the Philipines and somewhere in the fly-over. Well, now thanx to the Consumerist, I have a secret weapon – Verizon’s Landline Executive Customer Support:
Call 1-800-483-7988 and press 3 to reach the Verizon Customer Advocates for landlines and DSL
I called them today and got a support manager on the line who filed an escalated complaint and has promised to send out a technician tomorrow. Hopefully this will get the situation solved once and for all. If not, Speakeasy here I come.
*Edit*
If that doesn’t work, call the New York State Public Service Commission: 800-342-3377. They take complaints, register them and then force the utility companies to respond. From everyone I’ve spoken to, going this route gets the most difficult problems solved quickly.
Here’s their website: http://www.dps.state.ny.us/