Everyday, BCS has to deal with various dial tone providers, resellers, and brokers. In most cases, it makes for a very long day. I always feel as if I am dealing with people who truly want to do a good job, but the providers’ processes, company policies, and bureaucracy get in the way.
Partly to vent, and partly to see how you are feeling, here are my grades for the various dialtone providers. I start with the Big Kahuna.
Verizon – D.
To put it plainly, Verizon no longer cares about the outside plant cabling that delivers your dial tone from the central office (where the dial tone originates) to your office phone system, and this affects all of us, even if you’re with another provider (One Comm, Broadview, etc.).
The copper wire infrastructure is too expensive to maintain, and extremely susceptible to the environment. Many customers expect to hear static or hums on their telephone lines when it rains. This should be unacceptable.
I don’t get it. We constantly make excuses when Verizon drops the ball on maintaining their facilities or shows up late for an appointment or misses a completion date altogether, yet we do not have the same patience when dealing with the electric utility. How do we put pressure on Verizon to deliver reliable service?
One reason Verizon has ignored the copper cable infrastructure is their investment in their FiOS product, delivered by fiber. They only concentrated on high density cities and upscale towns. The investment never really paid off, in part because of their inability to bring TV on the fiber, which is affected by the town’s cable TV agreement. So, this past month, Verizon laid off most of their FiOS technicians.
IMHO, Verizon wants to abandon the delivery of dial tone in Massachusetts. A few years ago, they sold their New Hampshire dial tone and outside infrastructure to Fairpoint Communications, a company without the resources of Verizon. Eventually, I see the same thing happening here.
(I would have given Verizon an F, but I have found their field technicians and customer service people to be extremely competent, and to care about their job).
