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Similarly, Verizon has the best coverage in my area and has begun unlimited plans. Regardless, I have such a negative impression of the company from all the sto

by 67726e 10y ago

Similarly, Verizon has the best coverage in my area and has begun unlimited plans. Regardless, I have such a negative impression of the company from all the stories I've heard over the years that I'd really only switch if I had no other option. Even then I'd be hesitant.

sqeaky 10y ago
This is my situation. Verizon has the best coverage in Omaha, but I would rather deal with not having cell service in the middle of nowhere on very rare occasions than deal with the kind of pain I see Verizon subscribers go through.
JauntTrooper 10y ago
Honest question - why is their reputation so toxic? Comcast, I get. Their business model inspires hatred. They lure you with teaser rates on internet/cable then jack up the price 100%+ after the first year, banking on their local monopoly and their customers' unwillingness to sit on the phone for an hour to jump through hoops and reduce that price to "just" a 20% increase. I've never had a problem with Verizon, though. In fact my experience has been modestly positive. Their cell coverage is good and consistent (no unwanted apps on my iPhone). When I lived back East, we were quite happy Verizon FIOS came to our neighborhood and gave us a superior alternative to Comcast. Are they behaving like Comcast in other areas without alternative internet providers?
- 67726e 10y ago
  I suppose that's the funny thing, I've not had (too) many problems with Comcast. Then again I lost upwards of eight hours when I moved into my current house because their phone reps set up multiple accounts for me. With Verizon I've heard plenty of stories from friends of lock-in, specious fees, horrible customer service. All the fun stuff you hear from pretty much all the big players. Of course I'm talking strictly mobile service, which T-Mobile delivers adequately enough for me and has for the past five years. Phone service has been very word-of-mouth in my experience, and my friends with Verizon have scared me off of them for a long time. On the flipside T-Mobile did well at winning over a lot of folks I know.
- metaphorm 10y ago
  > Honest question - why is their reputation so toxic? combination of factors. atrocious customer service is a major one. failure to bring FIOS to market at the scale promised to local municipalities is another big issue. generally bad pricing where they extract extra fees from you for absurd reasons is another (not that they're alone in that bad practice).
- curun1r 10y ago
  From what I can tell, there's two sorts of Verizon customers/ex-customers...those who are happy with the service and those who've had to deal with their customer service representatives, especially as it relates to billing. It's saying something that despite having experienced their network coverage, and it is simply better than anyone else I've tried, I will never use Verizon again. Their service is that bad. In my case, it all started when a family member on our plan had her phone stolen a month before our hardware refresh date. I called them up to find out what could be done. Since it was an iPhone, they said I could only buy a new one at full price since Apple wouldn't let them do early upgrades. My suggestion (pay the ETF) was something they'd apparently never heard of, thought of or had any mechanism in place to handle. After several calls and getting passed around for a bit, one of their representatives had an idea. If I added a new line, swapped the number for a month I could then call in and have the contract switched over once the line no longer had an ETF. My only cost would be $40 for the extra unused line that month. That sounded reasonable...reasonable enough that I asked whether I could do it for all of the lines on my plan to keep the hardware refresh dates in sync. They said no problem. Fast forward one month, I call in to have the contracts transferred over. Their response, "we don't do that anymore." The best they could do was put what was now 3 unused lines on hold so I wasn't paying for them each month, but that would freeze the hardware refresh date/ETFs at the full 2 years. And even that could only be done for 3 months. I must have called them 20 times over the six months I tried to get the issue resolved and I spoke to countless supervisors. Nothing worked. The only solution I could find, which I told them many times was my option of last resort, was to switch to another carrier who would pay my ETFs. Their support couldn't make it happen. The whole ordeal cost me somewhere between $500-$1k. I'm now with a different carrier with an inferior network. I've missed a few calls on occasion and had some drop from time to time. But their support is friendly and able to solve problems. So I'm happy. I also know I'm not alone. In searching the internet for how to resolve these problems with Verizon, you see there are large numbers of customers like me who are subjected to their byzantine billing system and end up being given an endless runaround.
  - burntwater 10y ago
    My experience with Verizion (last time was about 5 years ago) was always that the Customer Service Reps were NICE people, but were utterly unable to do ANYTHING in their systems. They were very politely apologetic about not being able to do anything...
- mikestew 10y ago
  Honest question - why is their reputation so toxic? For me it goes back to when they'd disable some Bluetooth functionality on the phones they sold (and you had to buy their phones to use them on the Verizon network) so that they could sell you more services. Transfer those photos off your phone? The Verizon Photos Transfer Service will be an additional $5/month. People with, for example, the exact same phone only with an "AT&T" logo had the full functionality. And other stuff that I've forgotten. That was such a blatant example of rent seeking that I've been content to do without Verizon's services since.
  - sushid 10y ago
    Yup. In addition to the photo transfer disabling, Verizon also disabled the ability to add MIDI files to your folder, essentially forcing you to use their ringtone store app. Like the parent commenter mentions. This was around 2006-7, FYI.
  - ballenf 10y ago
    One more concrete example on the Galaxy S4 from Verizon, they preloaded a 3rd SMS app and made it the default. It worked similar to Hangouts or other messaging apps in that it would send non-sms messages to other Verizon Messages users and via SMS to other numbers. The kicker? They charge for those messages like SMS messages.
  - mrpippy 10y ago
    Agreed, it's easy to forget (~10 years ago) how anti-consumer and rent-seeking Verizon's behavior consistently was. Their phones didn't use J2ME apps, only the proprietary Qualcomm BREW, and apps could only come from their own app store (Get It Now). On WinMo/BlackBerry smartphones with GPS, only Verizon's own $5/month map/navigation app could use the GPS hardware. The list went on and on
metaphorm 10y ago
Verizon's coverage is excellent but it's network is over-congested (probably from building out coverage without also expanding backbone capacity to keep up). If you were the only person ever on the Verizon network it would be the best in North America. As it is now though it underperforms almost everything in densely populated areas.

by 67726e 10y ago

sqeaky 10y ago

This is my situation. Verizon has the best coverage in Omaha, but I would rather deal with not having cell service in the middle of nowhere on very rare occasions than deal with the kind of pain I see Verizon subscribers go through.

JauntTrooper 10y ago

Honest question - why is their reputation so toxic? Comcast, I get. Their business model inspires hatred. They lure you with teaser rates on internet/cable then jack up the price 100%+ after the first year, banking on their local monopoly and their customers' unwillingness to sit on the phone for an hour to jump through hoops and reduce that price to "just" a 20% increase. I've never had a problem with Verizon, though. In fact my experience has been modestly positive. Their cell coverage is good and consistent (no unwanted apps on my iPhone). When I lived back East, we were quite happy Verizon FIOS came to our neighborhood and gave us a superior alternative to Comcast. Are they behaving like Comcast in other areas without alternative internet providers?

67726e 10y ago
I suppose that's the funny thing, I've not had (too) many problems with Comcast. Then again I lost upwards of eight hours when I moved into my current house because their phone reps set up multiple accounts for me. With Verizon I've heard plenty of stories from friends of lock-in, specious fees, horrible customer service. All the fun stuff you hear from pretty much all the big players. Of course I'm talking strictly mobile service, which T-Mobile delivers adequately enough for me and has for the past five years. Phone service has been very word-of-mouth in my experience, and my friends with Verizon have scared me off of them for a long time. On the flipside T-Mobile did well at winning over a lot of folks I know.
metaphorm 10y ago
> Honest question - why is their reputation so toxic? combination of factors. atrocious customer service is a major one. failure to bring FIOS to market at the scale promised to local municipalities is another big issue. generally bad pricing where they extract extra fees from you for absurd reasons is another (not that they're alone in that bad practice).
curun1r 10y ago
From what I can tell, there's two sorts of Verizon customers/ex-customers...those who are happy with the service and those who've had to deal with their customer service representatives, especially as it relates to billing. It's saying something that despite having experienced their network coverage, and it is simply better than anyone else I've tried, I will never use Verizon again. Their service is that bad. In my case, it all started when a family member on our plan had her phone stolen a month before our hardware refresh date. I called them up to find out what could be done. Since it was an iPhone, they said I could only buy a new one at full price since Apple wouldn't let them do early upgrades. My suggestion (pay the ETF) was something they'd apparently never heard of, thought of or had any mechanism in place to handle. After several calls and getting passed around for a bit, one of their representatives had an idea. If I added a new line, swapped the number for a month I could then call in and have the contract switched over once the line no longer had an ETF. My only cost would be $40 for the extra unused line that month. That sounded reasonable...reasonable enough that I asked whether I could do it for all of the lines on my plan to keep the hardware refresh dates in sync. They said no problem. Fast forward one month, I call in to have the contracts transferred over. Their response, "we don't do that anymore." The best they could do was put what was now 3 unused lines on hold so I wasn't paying for them each month, but that would freeze the hardware refresh date/ETFs at the full 2 years. And even that could only be done for 3 months. I must have called them 20 times over the six months I tried to get the issue resolved and I spoke to countless supervisors. Nothing worked. The only solution I could find, which I told them many times was my option of last resort, was to switch to another carrier who would pay my ETFs. Their support couldn't make it happen. The whole ordeal cost me somewhere between $500-$1k. I'm now with a different carrier with an inferior network. I've missed a few calls on occasion and had some drop from time to time. But their support is friendly and able to solve problems. So I'm happy. I also know I'm not alone. In searching the internet for how to resolve these problems with Verizon, you see there are large numbers of customers like me who are subjected to their byzantine billing system and end up being given an endless runaround.
- burntwater 10y ago
  My experience with Verizion (last time was about 5 years ago) was always that the Customer Service Reps were NICE people, but were utterly unable to do ANYTHING in their systems. They were very politely apologetic about not being able to do anything...
mikestew 10y ago
Honest question - why is their reputation so toxic? For me it goes back to when they'd disable some Bluetooth functionality on the phones they sold (and you had to buy their phones to use them on the Verizon network) so that they could sell you more services. Transfer those photos off your phone? The Verizon Photos Transfer Service will be an additional $5/month. People with, for example, the exact same phone only with an "AT&T" logo had the full functionality. And other stuff that I've forgotten. That was such a blatant example of rent seeking that I've been content to do without Verizon's services since.
- sushid 10y ago
  Yup. In addition to the photo transfer disabling, Verizon also disabled the ability to add MIDI files to your folder, essentially forcing you to use their ringtone store app. Like the parent commenter mentions. This was around 2006-7, FYI.
- ballenf 10y ago
  One more concrete example on the Galaxy S4 from Verizon, they preloaded a 3rd SMS app and made it the default. It worked similar to Hangouts or other messaging apps in that it would send non-sms messages to other Verizon Messages users and via SMS to other numbers. The kicker? They charge for those messages like SMS messages.
- mrpippy 10y ago
  Agreed, it's easy to forget (~10 years ago) how anti-consumer and rent-seeking Verizon's behavior consistently was. Their phones didn't use J2ME apps, only the proprietary Qualcomm BREW, and apps could only come from their own app store (Get It Now). On WinMo/BlackBerry smartphones with GPS, only Verizon's own $5/month map/navigation app could use the GPS hardware. The list went on and on

metaphorm 10y ago

Verizon's coverage is excellent but it's network is over-congested (probably from building out coverage without also expanding backbone capacity to keep up). If you were the only person ever on the Verizon network it would be the best in North America. As it is now though it underperforms almost everything in densely populated areas.