Sometime in the middle of December a Verizon Fios salesman knocked on my door at dinnertime. I had Comcast at the time and Verizon just laid their fiber-optic cable in my neighborhood. I was thinking about switching, but only if there would be a significant savings over Comcast. I was very careful and I took notes on what the salesman was offering. I wanted the same services that I had with Comcast. After about an hour and several calculations I found that I would be saving roughly $400 per year. I already had one telephone line with Verizon and a second line with Comcast voice over IP. The salesman wrote on the order form both phone lines and marked off the TV stations with movie channels that would be included. He totaled up my TV's to calculate the charges for the equipment, and marked off the box for the internet service. I thought things were going pretty well at this point and I was given an installation date of Jan 5th. Verizon called several times before the installation date to confirm, and on one occasion I went over the charges with the customer service representative who told me that there was an error of $1 more, I didn't argue and I said OK.
On the date of installation I greeted the installer and went over the list of equipment and location of the TV's with him. When he confirmed my telephone line he told me that he didn't have an order to port my number over from Comcast. I told him that I didn't want to do anything until the number was ported over, but he insisted that he had to do the installation that day and that he could have the other number ported over in just a few days. I took the day off for the installation so I figured that I would just hang on to Comcast a little while longer and that I would have to get my messages with out the use of the phone line. It took 2 weeks for the number to port over and another visit from the installer. I was told that the installer would stop by between the hours of 8 and 5, and he didn't show up until 6:30 that evening. It took the installer about 2 hours to get me a dial tone except he couldn't get anyone in the service department to answer the phone to have the number activated. It was getting late and the installer told me that he would call from his home to take care of the activation. The next morning I discovered that my phone was still not working properly so I had to spend about an hour on the phone with tech support to take care of it myself.
Now back to the real problem. The salesman and his list of false promises start to kick in when I received my first bill, which almost caused me to have a heart attack. It was for close to $250 when it should have been around $186 but I also got a separate bill for my second phone line for $66.00 setting me back $316 for everything. So now instead of saving $400 a year, Verizon was costing me around $1,160 more a year than what I was paying for Comcast. I called up to complain about the bill and I was now told that there wasn't any error and that everything was right with the bill. I told the customer representative that I had an order form showing all three services for $168 per month plus taxes and fees. We went back and forth for over an hour, before I asked to speak with a supervisor. I was put on hold for about 15 mins, to which I was finally told that a supervisor would call me back in around a day or two. No one called and I called back a week later only to get the same result, but this time I was transferred four times before I spoke with the right person. I realized I was getting the royal run around and I told this person that if they couldn't honor the signed agreement I was going to cancel my service and I was going back to Comcast. To try to quiet me down the CSR gave me a $30 a month credit. I was still not satisfied and I told her that this was not satisfactory at which point she said that I would have to talk to the vendor they contracted to do the door to door sales with. This was now getting to be absurd, but she insisted that the she would have the sales manager call me back in a day or two. Well that was about two weeks ago. I called back yesterday to talk to another CSR and I told this lady that I would make it simple, if they couldn't honor the original agreement, my next call would be to Comcast, and after the attorney generals for the state of Maryland and US government, the public service commission, the FCC, the local TV stations and I would spread my story all over the internet as well. The CSR told me that she could transfer me over to the retention department where they could give me more credits. I was exhausted already, but I figured what the heck go ahead and disappoint me one more time. The CSR put me on hold and after about a 10 minute wait I was disconnected. Hello Comcast, I'm coming home.
My advice to anyone considering getting or switching to Verizon Fios is to just say NO!!!
Websiteguy
Baltimore, Maryland
U.S.A.
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