Telecom Hell

Most non-bloggers don't realize how much work it is. Every week or so you have to come up with something that you care about and that other people might find interesting enough to write about. When short of inspiration, though, you can always call a telecom company.

One of my projects for the summer is to rationalize my telecom situation. Right now I pay about $45/month for fixed line, $125/month for mobile (4 lines), $46/month for cable Internet, and $54/month for standard cable TV. So I'm switching to digital cable for $30/month for the first year, and I decided to try out DSL.

So I went to Verizon's web site and added DSL, which should have been $25/month without contract and with a free modem and router. Disturbingly, the confirmation had no indication of what I had actually bought. First they sent me an installation package without a modem, so I called (that in itself took about 5 phone calls - first I talked to tech support and they said I should go to a "Verizon store" and buy a modem) and they said they would ship me one. When I got the modem and set it up, I logged into my account and saw that I was signed up for a 1-year contract at $38/month. So I called billing, where a very helpful person said I had an $8/month discount, so my net price was $30/month, and I had a $0 early termination fee, so it was like having no contract, and I had a 30-day money back guarantee anyway. $30, $25, whatever. But when I asked about the impact on my fixed line discount, she said that she couldn't see my fixed line bill. (She also said that she had no way of seeing what offers were available on the web site - so not only are orders not correctly transferred from the web to the back office, but the back office has no idea what thoses orders might have been.) So Verizon, which is trying to tell all the analysts that it has these great synergies between all its products, doesn't even have call center people who can see information about multiple products at once.

But this comedy pales in comparison to Verizon's tech support. I got DSL working with my laptop plugged directly into the modem, but I wanted to put my wireless router in the middle. With Comcast, you just plug the router into the cable modem and everything works. With Verizon DSL, it doesn't. I did some searching on their support pages and found out that I needed to program the router to use PPPoE with a username and password. It still didn't work, so I decided to call tech support. After about 6 minutes navigating the phone tree, I got an error message saying the number I wanted was not in service. I called again and the same thing happened. This is the phone company, remember.

So I did some more searching online, and discovered I needed to put the modem into bridge mode. I could find the instructions for how to do this on the Westell 2200, but not on the 6100F, which is what I have. I found instructions for the 6100, but the first page of instructions had no Next button. Through more searching I found page 7 of the instructions, from which I was able to navigate to the page I wanted, but the page was out of date because Verizon had changed the user interface for the modem configuration (which I discovered after guessing the default password for the modem, since nowhere had they given it to me). I found other instructions in non-Verizon-affiliated forums, but they also did not account for the new UI. Finally through enough clicking around I discovered how to configure the modem properly and got it to work with the router.

So now it works. I am probably going to cancel on principle because of Verizon's inability to connect me to a tech support person (who probably would have been useless). If not, I need to decide if $16/month in savings are enough to compensate for the 2001-era speed of Verizon DSL (1.5Mb down, 400Kb up - I get over 15Mb down with Comcast).