The IT Guys Blog

Verizon Business is the division you are placed in if you spend a good chunk of change with verizon. I’m not sure of the exact level required, but it’s enough to push you above and beyond their small and medium business depts, which I’m sure are just as bad. There’s a few reasons why they are so terrible.

• Verizon Business isn’t really one company or division. - Verizon sub-contracts out any work that they can’t handle to the lowest local bidder.
• Unions -Usually for the workforce these are good but when you are on the receiving end well that’s another story. Lets just say plan to wait a good two to three months if you need service moved or transferred.
• The number one reason. - Verizon buys out a lot of little telcos and some sizable ones, but they forget to ever integrate them.

I’ll give you a brief run down of our experience with this company. Some names have been changed to protect the guilty.

This whole saga began when our company was shopping for a new phone system. We aren’t a very large company, at least not in my eyes. We have about 6 locations and they are fairly small, about 15 people in each office with about 40 in the home office. So one bright sunny day Verizon Sales comes out and pitches this wonderful phone system to the brass at our company. Everything sounded great; it wasn’t the cheapest quote we had received, but it was well within budget, and because it was Verizon we would only have to deal with one company. That is, if there was trouble there wouldn’t be any finger pointing between the phone system vendor and the telephone services provider. The sales pitch included new T1 lines for every site including an upgrade in the main site to a bonded T1 line, Alcatel OXO phone system with digital phones, VOIP to every site, and the management to make it happen. It was pitched to the higher ups in our company in a way that they didn’t even think to talk to their current IT Guy. For the record the current IT Guy was an outsourced company.

Phase two of operation make my life hell began when Verizon decided to change IP addresses at our main location. Which just happens to VPN to about 100 hospitals and companies all over the world, oops. Once the task of re-configuring the entire network from an IP standpoint and integrating the point to point line that Verizon recommended to connect two buildings that are 100 feet apart was through we began contacting 100 pissed off clients that didn’t understand why they can’t get into our software. Next we had to actually make the phone system 4-digit dial work. You would think the guys they hired from Alcatel could figure that out, after all it’s their phone system, but Verizon managed to locate the only guys that work at Alcatel-Lucent that don’t know how to install a phone system. There were the normal growing pains at first: no voice mail, extensions were wrong, phones didn’t have certain features, when you called in our phone system might randomly hang up on you, 4-digit dialing didn’t work. These were to be expected for a day or two, once six months went by, yes you read that correctly, our company got angry with Verizon and started demanding things. At first this technique of demanding things and threatening not to pay produced results. Our only issue was the 4-digit dialing and some minor ACD issues in our call center. The 4-digit dialing took the Verizon/Alcatel team about 14 Months to fix.

Phase three of operation FUBAR was a good one! Random 911 calls started coming into the State Police from our location. I don’t mean a few here or there either, I mean 30-40 a week. After about the second week of this the State Police showed up with an electronics guru who had a giant pair of ratcheting cutters and he was ready to cut service to our building. After the higher ups in the company begged and pleaded with the State Police, and probably slipped them a few anonymous donations too, they left. Verizon was always sure it was a user at our site or a mis-configured fax machine dialing 911 by accident. This happened on and off for about 3 months until the CEO at our company threatened to rip the whole phone system out. Two hours after that threat they found the problem; Verizon had accidentally listed a number to a military base in NJ in their 911 lookup system and they listed us as the address. So if somebody got hurt at this base in NJ and they called 911, Police showed up at our location in PA. The police couldn’t figure out why calls kept coming in when they were already on-site, it’s because they weren’t on-site.

Phase four of this master plan hasn’t happened yet but it’s not too far off. When this whole contract was signed all the terms were 3 years, that’s pretty standard for T1 lines and stuff. The issue is that Verizon acquired MCI and with that came MCI’s backbone UUNET. In the past, Verizon would pay to use other backbones, ours was Qwest. So now we are a little over two years into this project and things are starting to work right, but guess what? We have to do it all over again in less than a year. Verizon refuses to re-term the agreements on our current data lines because they only sell these UUNET T1 lines now. We get to go through the whole 4-digit dialing, change our IP saga a second time.

The moral of this story is simple, avoid Verizon at all costs.