Fred pays Verizon for DSL service, but his home Internet speeds are now slower than a crawl. This changed after technicians were in his neighborhood fixing the lines. When he called to complain about the slowdown, he was told that his connection was so slow because it was too fast, and they would have to downgrade his account to a slower speed so it would stop being so slow. No, this doesn’t make any sense.

I live on a section of street that has had telephone infrastructure issues for years. Almost every time that Verizon’s trucks are at work on the overhead lines, it seems that my phone or Internet service is disrupted, from new noisy lines, to slow or no Internet connection, to a few instances of a neighbor’s phone ringing at my home, and vice versa. It has been this way since my 1999 ADSL connection was initiated. I am sure that my phone repair records folder resembles a small dictionary.

About 3 weeks ago Verizon was in the air working on the lines in front of my home and soon after, my Internet connection was very, very slow. Who knows if the outside work had anything to do with this slowdown. In any event, I called Verizon on Oct. 4th and stated my plight, of course after being on the phone in menu hell for an extended time. They promised to come by the next day, a shock in itself. On Oct. 5th, midday, the Verizon technician arrived. I explained the whole schmeel, and that Verizon’s own web test site showed (numerous times) that usually I had a 137 kbps download, and a 677 kbps upload speed, quite slow and the exact opposite of ADSL performance. After some tests and pinging and so forth, he proudly determined that my modem was failing, and replaced same. After he left the property I spent time on the net, and things were no different…. just plain sloooow.

On Oct 6th in the early AM, I spent 2.5 hours on the phone, having to make 4 phone calls to Verizon as there were disconnections, hang-ups and other issues generated from Verizon Customer Service Hell. Eventually they determined that there was a problem on their end, something that I had drummed on from the beginning. They explained that they would have to make changes at the Central Office, as my problem was that I was “getting too fast a speed (5-7.5 mbps), and would need to go to a slower 3 mbps speed”. I questioned how going to a slower feed was going to make my service faster.

Of course they obfuscated and I settled on getting on with the change and they then sent me to billing, as I was going to get a new, slower, less expensive service. I was connected successfully with billing, even though one cannot ordinarily get billing on weekends by phone. By the time I was through with the helpful rep at billing, I was informed that the new service would start on Oct. 11th. I remarked that I have been suffering with faulty service for weeks, and now it is going to go on even longer? I got sympathy and excuses, so I just thanked the rep and went on with my life, with a connection that rivals dial-up.

The bottom line: my service was too fast which made it slow …. and a new slower service will make it faster… hmmmm

Thank you Verizon… BTW, what is Comcast’s (heaven forbid) phone number?

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