Fun With FiOS

So yesterday afternoon I was on the phone with a friend an the call got cut off. I assumed it was their cell phone as I was on my home landline. But my Internet also went down. My cable TV (also through FiOS) was fine. The phone came back quickly but the Internet stayed down for a bit. I called FiOS.

They had me reboot the router (my original, now 8 year-old Actiontec MI424WR) and that didn't help. They remotely ran some tests and rebooted the Network Terminal (the box on the house) and after a few failed attempts, it worked.

Today, again at 2:30, my Internet went down. Phone line was dead too (the wired landline had no dial tone). After a few minutes the phone service came back but the Internet didn't (and the TV remained unaffected). I called FiOS. They ran some tests had me reboot the router and rebooted the Network Terminal and nothing, still no Internet.

He was placing an order to have someone come visit and all of a sudden the network came back. He confirmed he wasn't doing anything and no idea what happened or why. But two days in a row, at the same time, two of my three services went down and came back. Seems very strange to me.

They're sending me a new router.

FiOS Support has been okay. They're friendly enough. The voice menu isn't too bad though yesterday once I got a human he had me confirm a few too many things (I confirmed my number, name and address, but I had to tell him my cell phone number and email address in case they needed another way to contact me). Also they needed to tell me about the online services to resolve issues and survey I'll get later. The second guy did that process a little smoother. Yesterday when I got the separate survey call it disconnected.

Still they say there's stuff at verizon.com to offer support and there's an agent I can run to fix some things. Of course without Internet you can't get to this and last I looked the agent was Windows only, no Mac support. Yes I pointed this out to them.

The second guy today was in the process of setting up a service visit, I asked if I there was an order number I'd need if I had to call back to change it, he said it would come in my email. I said I wouldn't know because my internet is down. He laughed and said that was funny. I suppose it might be but they sounded like this had never occurred to them before. (Yes I could check my email via my phone over LTE but still). Also they said the window for the visit tomorrow (a Saturday) was 8am-5pm. I told him that an 11 hour window for a service call has been the butt of late night jokes for over decade now.

I expect it to happen again tomorrow afternoon.