Say What You Will About Verizon…
I think they get a bad rap.
Sure, when you call them on the phone, their automated menus are infuriating, and when you do get to a human, you’ll be lucky if that’s the last person you’ll need to speak to about your issue.
However, at least in my recent experience, their on-site technicians are five-star, top-notch professionals.
Today we had FIOS Business Internet installed at the house. (The 20Mbps down/5Mbps up package with a static IP address.) The installation could not have gone more smoothly nor have been more pleasant. (That being said, I will report that I was prepared to grease the tech’s palm to make him do what I wanted. But I didn’t have to.)
When he arrived (at the time he said he would when he called about 30 minutes prior) he introduced himself and was nice enough. He let me tell him my “vision” of what I wanted him to do including pulling the fiber into my basement and mounting his equipment where I had already mounted a piece of plywood in my furnace area. He was happy to do it like I laid out. (It probably helped that I had an electrician there at the same time installing the necessary electrical, and he offered to help snake the cable.)
The tech spent about 45 minutes outside running the fiber from the street to my house, then down the side, into a hole he drilled (and later filled on both sides with heavy-duty exterior caulk), and into the basement. The inside work took about 30 or 45 minutes, and the final initialization of the FIOS gear took about 15 minutes. (I think two attempts were necessary, because on the second attempt it actually did what it was supposed to do: download a bunch of stuff and restart itself, which it did neatly.)
Five minutes of reconfiguring my router, and my internal DNS server, and I was up and running. I did not take the Verizon-provided router, and I did the software reconfiguration myself.
All in all, a great experience from the time I placed the order with a knowledgable sales person, through today’s installation.
Great job Verizon!
