In some ways, I have sympathy for Verizon and its FIOS deployment. Rolling out fiber to hundreds of thousands of buildings in hundreds of cities is a monumental task.

However, I have personally experienced their bungling and know it to be beyond the pale.

For instance I was attempting to get a business connected to FIOS. Fiber from Verizon was already in the building; approximately a dozen offices were already using it.

So I called Verizon and gave the address to start the order process.

Verizon’s response: “That location is not eligible for fiber. There is no fiber there.”

I said, after the second call and another rejection, that “I am standing in the telecom room. I am looking at the Verizon ONT* and the fiber lines coming into the building. I know there is Verizon fiber here because people in this building are already using it. I am looking at the fiber equipment right now.”

But no matter how I tried, I couldn’t convince them that this building which already had FIOS fiber from Verizon with active users was “eligible” for FIOS.

Finally, after four or five more calls, I convinced Verizon to send a technician to come out and take a look. Then Verizon finally agreed that the building where they already had many FIOS customers currently using FIOS was eligible for FIOS.

So, something that should’ve taken minutes became a two week affair thanks to Verizon incompetence.

On the bright side, after installation the line never went down even for a second in over three years of hard use. I’ve had T-1s and T-3s and above that fared worse, so that’s pretty impressive.

*Optical Network Terminal, a piece of fiber equipment (really mostly a transceiver) that converts fiber to Ethernet or other formats.