How to spoil a movie night in one easy step.
Last night, my wife and I decided to watch a movie using Verizon FiOS TV’s video-on-demand (VOD) feature. About an hour into the movie, the audio started breaking up and the video started pixelating. Then this error message appeared:
“Error
A problem has occurred with your request. Please ensure that the wires are securely connected to your set-top box. If you continue to experience problems please contact Verizon at (888)553-1555 and specify code (CL-14).”
Yes, happy Valentine’s Day to you too, Verizon. My wife had fallen asleep on the sofa, so I put on some soft music and used the opportunity to help Verizon debug their problem. I’m such a nice consumer.
Incidentally, in the old days, area codes were optional for local calls, which is why they were put in parenthesis. Most area codes are no longer optional, and toll-free area codes never were, so let’s all agree never ever to put area codes in parenthesis again. Mmm-kay?
I called Verizon and waited 18 minutes on hold before getting to speak to somebody. While on hold, I did what every TV consumer would do in the same situation. (No, not go to the bathroom.) I went to the basement, restarted the broadband router (being sure to leave it off for about 20 seconds), came back upstairs, restarted the cable box (ditto), and tried to access VOD again. No luck, same error message. One variant of the error message simply referred to “Error 14” and didn’t include a phone number.
Guess what the Verizon representative suggested? Yup, restarting the router and cable box. So we did, same results.
“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
– Albert Einstein
At this point, my romantic Valentine’s Day evening was toast. Maybe the V-Day Blizzard of ’07 had knocked out a Verizon server? Maybe VOD was getting hammered by all the romantic couples in New England? I asked the Verizon rep where he was. California.
I was on the phone with Verizon for 55 minutes and they were not able to solve the problem. We verified that FiOS Internet service worked fine, Verizon TV worked fine, everything worked except VOD. Sounds like a Verizon VOD server issue to me. Or maybe I was just imagining the problem. Could be either.
I had to ask the rep what Verizon was going to do to make this very patient customer whole. (Hint #1: good companies take the initiative to make their customers happy and actually have their own ideas about how to do this. Hint #2: keeping customers on the phone for 55 minutes to debug a 2-hour movie and then offering no compensation isn’t one of those good ideas.) He asked me to call back and check on the trouble ticket. After my prompting, he said that he’d ask his supervisor about giving a week of service credit (whatever that means). I explained that I had invested 55 minutes of my life on this and was not investing any more time. I said that they could email me to close out the matter. The Verizon rep said he had no means to send email to me. (They should try Verizon FiOS Internet service in California.) “Humor me,” I said, “and enter my email address in the file.” He did. I’m not holding my breath.
Verizon is making Apple TV look better every day.
I greatly regret switching from Comcast where I had no problems to the hell that is known as Verizon FIOS! Several days without phone, internet or TV service, many, many hours on hold and dealing with incompetent and sometimes rude customer service, along with failure to adhere to promised credits and quoted prices. It’s completely unacceptable. They have no solutions or compensation for you. It’s like they’re begging you to go back to Comcast by their indifferent service. Three times we take off from work and lose money to wait for techs who never show up and nobody ever calls. One support rep told me he would never use Verizon. He says he has Comcast himself! Another rep informed me that I don’t have FIOS and never did. Soon I think I won’t…
Here’s a good one for you.. I went to work for Verizon.. While in training I got my fios internet and tv hooked up. They were at my home for 9 hours for install.. To me thats really rediculous.. Anywho.. I was working in customer service for verizon. It was ok.. but when you get on the floor to sell service.. they basically have you lie to the customers to have them sign a 2 year agreement of service. Well I chose to be truthful to the customers because no one likes to be lied to. So my sales suffered. Plus I had to pay full price for my package even though I was an employee. I was paying $124.65 for my 2 services with 2 hd boxes. I thought that was a little too expensive. Well I decited to look for another job and was hired at the local cable company Brighthouse. What a relief!! They train you the way you should be and for customer satisfaction. Plus I get free cable with all premium channels and all other channels that arent ppv, I get ppv’s 40% off (events and movies), free internet, and phone for $19.00 a month (employee price) WOW!! And install took about 1 1/2 hours. But of corse I had to pay verizon $179.99 to cancel my service with them. If you ask me.. I think for as big as a company they are.. they could do better. My co workers there knew almost nothing about hd. Brighthouse had hd training for their customer service reps to help customers when they call in. I just wanted to warn everyone about getting fios.. you may have been lied to just so they get you in that 2 year agreement. Oh and if you signed up to get that free tv.. good luck. It taked about 10 weeks after your 1st bill comes out to even think about giving you that offer. Plus if you cancel your fios, you cant give the tv back, you have to pay retail price for it plus you cancellation fee. SO EVERYONE PLEASE BEWARE!!!
I have had fios for about 5 hours now and all of a sudden a white box with a gray border around it showed up in the center right side of my screen. How do i get rid of it?
We had FIOS installed on Dec10th”07.I have spend hours on the phone and sent many e’mails to customer service. We have not received our letter from Verizon to get the Advertised free TV. Here it is Feb 12th and every {excuse }or lie you can think of has been told to us. They have gone so far as to say we weren’t hooked up until Jan.31st 2008 according to their records in their computer!!! I have all the documents proving day of Dec10. Doesn’t seem to matter that I am being billed for Fios since DEC.10th.Talk about dealing with a bunch of stone heads ,I believe Verizon hired them all!!! I wrote a letter to a vice pres of relation’s they have been trying to reach me,but every time I call back the number they give me I get voice mail,saying all reps are busy. I leave my number to call back ,You guessed right, “NO RETURN CASLLS!!!
I recently had fios installed in my home. Let’s just say it was about as uncomfortable as sleeping in your mother-in-laws dining room. The technician was nice enough but seemed to know more about car stereos than he did about fios. He refused to put up a backboard to mount all of this new equipment to and he kept saying over and over how “hot” he was keeping it. I don’t even know what that means. Nothing works right, my internet service has never worked. The technician said he needed to use 2 routers for some reason. I certainly hope that this isn’t the best verizon can do. I’ve cancelled the service–welcome back good old cable tv.
The FiOS group is trained to say you cannot go back to copper/DSL and no amount of escalation will help you return to DSL; however, it will help if you escalate to another group. For anyone wanting to go back to copper and DSL, complain to Media Relations for your area (http://newscenter.verizon.com/media-contacts/). He/She will most likely refer you to someone in Customer Relations who will let you go back to DSL. VZ has invested a lot of money in FiOS and does NOT want customers reverting back to copper. It doesn’t look good in their FiOS numbers reported to Wall Street. VZ is SUPPOSED to tell you you can never go back to copper BEFORE they do the installation and have you SIGN (in writing or electronically) an authorization to pull the copper. I was not advised before installation.
I had the same exact issue. I finally got them to come to the house. they were there for over 6 hours. first they replaced the router with a newer router. then they replaced the ONT (box on outside of house) then they replaced the battery backup and some of the cabling. Called in another guy, and ended up replacing a $2 splitter and suddenly wala, it works again. it has been working fine now for the past week. yeah!
FiOS: In Richmond it was marketed before the their systems and staff were ready. Result: a nightmare to set up. Now, tho, TV, Internet, and phones are working well. BUT, as with any technology, there are occasional problems, and the tech support menu is torture. I have found that their installers and local tech people are very good. Have had to replace the Internet / PC router (that should not happen in just 7 months!) and have trouble sometimes with one TV remote.
Question: we had a Pioneer plasma TV installed by Best Buy. Their guy said that with FiOS we cannot use most of the TV features and adjustments (such as color and PIP). Can this be true? The HD pix are great – at least as good as what I have seen on Comcast – but are too vivid. What’s the deal?
Folks. Regarding pixelation with your video on demand, etc. If you have a 611 model ONT on the side of your house you very likely need a low-pass filter put on your coax cable leaving the ONT. If you are having pixelation problems go out to your ONT to see what model you have. If it says 611 anywhere on it you need to check the coaxial wire between the ONT and the video splitter to see if the technician installed a Low Pass filter (it says Low Pass right on the thing). If you don’t have one you need to put in a service call to get one. Nothing they do remotely is going to fix the problem. I install FiOS every day, all day and I see this problem regularly. Hope this helps.
OK Here in Portland Oregon (as you may have read above) we finally got FiOS TV a couple of days ago in my area (Tigard-Sherwood area) and have had nothing but success with it. Although Verizon absolutely has the WORST customer service (we had a long standing DSL issue with them a while back-dont get me started) the service on the FioS side has been nothing short of spectacular. Now that I’ve said this, it’ll probably adhere to Murphy’s Law and the whole shebang will probably blow up in my face 🙂
But as of now, the internet and TV are flawless. They have done everything as they said they would and the picture quality is great. There have been a coupl eof small hiccups, (channels not changing speedily/properly, guide issues etc) but the dude who hooked up our TV said that those things might happen and they would be resloved within 24 hours of activation and they were (to my surprise!) I can’t speak to the functionality of the Verizon/Motorola remote as I immediately set up our Harmony to work with it. Zero issues. I hope everyone else either got what they wanted out of Verizon or got their service fixed. Looks like I was one of the lucky ones…