FIOS Installation Woes

What a pain.

I had comcast cable and verizon for phone and DSL. I decided to switch to Verizon FIOS since for less money I could get more service. There's a long story but there are lots of incentives for signing up and every time I called with an issue they gave me more of a discount. I'm content with my comcast cable tv and have my HDTiVo all setup and don't really want to change. I checked and FIOS will be much cheaper for all the movie channels I get but maybe in a couple of months.

I rent a floor in a house. My landlord is an electrican and as you can imagine is very particular about the work done on the house. So he wanted to be here when the FIOS installer came. So on Tuesday they show up and talk outside the house. My landlord says he can't drill any new holes or hang new porcelin but he should use the stuff that's already there. The FIOS guy says he can't do that, my landlord tells me to have them send another guy. Joy, but I call up and do and we reschedule for Friday. My landlord says he's going to have one of his guys here for the installation, I say fine. It turns out it will be his son.

So Friday a FIOS guy arrives and the landlord's son is here and they talk outside and agree on how to procede and all is going well. It's odd that the FIOS guy never talks to me but he's with the landlord's son the whole time. They get the wire into the basement and are installing the Optical Network Terminal (ONT) box and the Battery Back Up (BBU) box and changing the wires (the copper phone wire comes out the fiber line comes in). My landlord shows up at some point talks with them and then with me and says the guy is good, much better than the one from Tuesday. If he's happy, I'm happy.

The ONT takes the fiber line in and then sends the phone, data and TV out over either Cat5 wire or a coax cable. My apartment is of course wired with coax jacks and cat5 on all the phone jacks. So I plan to have comcast over the coax and the FIOS over the the cat5. I'll change one phone jack to an ethernet jack and plug the wireless router Verizon gives you into that. The other phone jacks will have phones. My mac laptop will connect wirelessly and my desktop PC I'll connect with an eithernet cable. My HDTiVo and AirPort Express (wth my printer and stereo speakers connected) will be clients on the wireless network too.

So all is going well when at about 2pm the FIOS guy knocks on my door and brings in the wireless router into my unit and explains that they use the coax line to bring the service into my unit. I say I'm still using comcast and thinks for a little and says both can run over the same coax which doesn't sound right to me. He says, he's running out to get a coax splitter and some lunch. Fine. He comes back and says he has to leave because Verizon won't pay his overtime and another crew will come in and gives me the cell phone number of his foreman. At this point I get to know the landlord's son as we wait what turns out to be an hour (with two calls to the foreman in there).

The next FIOS guy arrives and he's got a bad back. Anthony shows him the work to do. Finish removing some wires outside the house, move a wire in front of the basement panel to behind it, and connect the stuff in my unit. The guy in confused about how to send it over the coax with comcast there. Apparently they can use the cat5 (they prefer the coax) but he looks at my phone jack and says it's not cat5 (just regular phone wire which isn't sufficient). He talks to his foreman and apparently they had some training on this this week which really isn't encouraging. The landlord's son checks the phone jack and it turns out there really isn't cat5 there. So we debate, since to run cat5 there will be a pain and the landlord will want to do that himself. Drilling a new connection is out of the question.

So I say what if I get FIOS TV then they can just use the coax and all will be ok. I would probably want to do that in a few months anyway. Unfortunately he doesn't have the TV equipment he'll need so they'll have to come back next week. At this point I have phone but no internet service and living 5 days without net service doesn't interest me. Temporarily he'll put the wireless router in the basement (connected directly to the ONT) and I can connect to it from my laptop. My desktop doesn't do wireless but I don't use the PC too much (well I have been doing some contract work on it but I can do that without the net for a few days). So after an hour of reviewing and thinking we have a plan. Since he doesn't want to climb a ladder with his back he calls yet another guy to help. It's close to 6pm on a Friday.

So they start working downstairs. I call the foreman again who's apologetic but I'm still annoyed. I have been the person who has to calm down the annoyed customer so I always try to be polite when dealing with people. He says I should call verizon and order the TV service and they'll give me a new installation date probably far out. After theres an order in I should call him back and he'll escalate it to early next week, tue or wed at the latest. I call Verizon and get a nice woman who sign me up and puts me on hold to complete the order. I was on hold for about 10 mins with the most depressing slow instrumental hold music. She says she can't complete the order until the technicians who are here close the current order, so I have to call back on Saturday. I tell her I'm a programmer and the order system they make her use sucks.

The landlord's son has called his father and caught him up, and he wants to talk to me. So I call him and he's annoyed that his son was there all this time, the work should have been done in 4-5 hours tops. Then he says he'll have to charge me for his son's time since he wasn't out working. I say we'll we didn't agree to that. He says he told me that he'd have to send a guy over. I said yeah but that doesn't mean I'd have to pay for it and we didn't discuss rates. He said he'd discount it but I should go after Verizon for the money. His tactic with me is to just talk loud and without break. I'm not in the mood and say I agree that Verizon screwed up here and that he and I will have to work something out. The landlord isn't wrong about his son's time but I don't look forward to being in the middle of this.

After a little bit they finish the other work and the wireless router is set up in the basement. My surfing speed is definately faster which is nice. I'm on the phone talking with some friends when I hear people outside where the wires are. The two verizon guys and the landlord's son are arguing about the wiring. Apparently all the work is done, but the verizon guys don't like how it's done. it should be on their own hooks, etc. I gather phone guys and electricians each think the others work is crap. I tell them it's 7pm on a Friday, just go home already. When I leave at 7:30 to meet friends the Verizon guys are still there talking. Thank you to my friends for hearing this rant first hand last night.

This morning I got the iVo and AirPort Express connected to the network. I called Verizon and order the TV service with 2 cable cards (hopefully they work better than Comcast's) and I'll need a settop box for the bedroom TV. The nice woman this time manages to get me an appointment for Tuesday.

We'll see what happens.