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.
russ..maybe i can help you out.Are u saying you have no guide at all.If you dont have a guide that means the technician didnt run coax to your main computer.they should have given you an alctel router..dont know if thats the name but if you do see if there is a coax feeding from the back.the battery and the garage door opener is a strange one.Verizon , all they do is plug in the battery to an existing outlet.as long as it is not plugged into outlet of garage door opener yuo shouldnt have a problem..what you can do is unplug the battery..see if that works…let me know
I was promised a free LCD TV with my install. I was told this by the rep when I originally called about server… and he knew where I was and told me specifically that the offer was available in my area. We also had an extra TV outlet installed for the TV… which by now you can guess… never should up. For the last 4 months our so we have called asking where the TV was and we were always told it would be here shortly. One person told us they couldn’t send the TV until we signed our 2-year agreement… then saw that we already had… and told us again we should receive it shortly.
Finally, today we called and were told that the offer was not available in Oregon. Great. We paid $175 to break our agreement with DirectTV.. were promissed a free HDTV… had a jack installed for it… paid for it for a half year now all while they were telling us that it would show up… only now to hear it wouldn’t be coming. And of course… we are stuck with that 2-year agreement with no way out.
I have had one of the most horrible expriences getting Fios installed in my home. You can fill in the blanks – I’ll spare the long story. However, I know that Fios is the better product so I have been struggling to get it all installed. Later on, it will pay off media-wise. Comcast had issues too that they could never fix for me so that was another reason I have switched. I got it installed yesterday and my plasma blew (UGH!) but my other 3 HD boxes were installed finally. Right now I have no guide information even though all boxes have an IP address. They don’t know what to do for me but eventually it will get fixed. They have the superior service, they’ve just grown too fast to handle it and we are all suffering. It just depends on how much you are willing to endure. As well, from the comments I am reading some of your issues could have been resolved by reading the full documentation on the Fios website. That is not their fault.
We have been fairly satisfied with Verizon. We had a long list of problems with Comcast, but have had just a few with Verizon. We have the cable/internet/phone package. The internet portion works great, and the picture quality seems to have better definition than did Comcast. For our neighborhood in Beaverton, Oregon, the upload and download speeds are much, much faster than Comcast’s fastest. The cable TV works okay, but there are a few glitches: the descriptions of shows in the TV listings portion is frequently wrong — a different program being aired rather than the one listed — and the actual description of what any show is about is laughably bad. They might as well just say, “This is a movie”. Also, frequently movies stop recording at 2 hours — either recording the remainder as a second movie, or not recording anything over 2 hours at all. The phone portion of the Verizon service has a few glitches: several times a day the phone rings a short, half-ring from a leaking signal in some junction box; and the installation of the converter box with battery backup in our garage has killed both of our remote garage-door openers. The Verizon tech said it is the garage door openers, the garage door company says it is Verizon (hint: the problem started within minutes after FIOS was installed.) Are these problems enough to cause us to switch back to Comcast? Certainly not: Comcast was a nightmare of frequent problems and endless phone trees that led to script-reading techs. I’ll stick with Verizon but really wish they would do something about those TV listing errors. And it would be nice to close my garage door.
I have been reading these posts about fios internet and tv and woww Y ou would think that this is the worst service out here.I just have to say I have had verizon fios tv internet and phone in nnj for year and half and have had no problems whatsoever.I had dishnetwork before this and i liked their service but little expensive for just standard.Also when i need assistance from dish I always got the runaround and their repair guy was someone who did not speak a word of english.Again so far veizon has been outstanding..If u need tech support it takes 5 minutes to get thru…now customer service is another story i agree with that…overall 5 out of 5..My picture quality is outstanding ..even on std with my pioneer 50 inch plasma it looks awesome..just like commercial..I guess what im saying here..i have had no problems and yes verizon is a big company and yes there will be problems but overall they are doing the job.I watch movies in the internet and there is no delay..it just plays…i recommend verizon fios..any questions ask me..a happy customer
I had Verizon FIOS triple-play installed early January. I have three computers in a wireless network (with a wireless printer) hooked up to the internet and, apart from a blown router which they replaced quickly and without any arguement (and gave me a months free service because of the inconvenience,) the service has been fantastic. TV is equally as good (much better than DirectTV, except for the channel lineup) and we’ve had no problems with our two STBs and DVR. And we even received our free tv within the 10 weeks we were told it would take. I’ll never go back to DirectTV (despite the daily offers I get from them in the mail.)
Here’s a follow up to my post of May 22, 2008 about Verizon. I have had two Verizon installers in my house. Neither one of these guys could get Verizon on the phone to assist them in my installations. Imagine it….as consumers we have all kinds of problems contacting Verizon. Even their OWN employees can’t get ahold of their technical service people. The installer who came to my house on May 22, 2008 admitted that Verizon has, ironically, all kinds of internal problems with–imagine this–their customer service department!! I felt like I was on the witness stand when I called Verizon’s “customer service” department to get their internet service problem at my house corrected. Their rep accused me of “not giving Verizon a chance to correct the poor reception problems.” I reminded him I had a 30 day contractual right to cancel the bundled contract with Verizon, and I had no obligation to “give them a chance to correct the problem.” He told me he had never heard of a split-signal problem and I told him, “Well, you learn something new every day:)” When he continued to argue with me I told him, “Look, if you want my business, run a separate line, at your expense to the router on my computer. That should solve the problem. They agreed to do it, and the installer agreed that I would not be charged. I just can’t wait to see my first bill from Verizon. In the meantime, I am once again again getting great reception from Dish Network for the HDTV, and I backed off to a 5 kb internet connection. I found very little difference between 5kb and 15kb. Don’t waste your money on the extra kilobites…not worth it. This company–Verizon–is just too big and expanding too fast to maintain any decent installations and service. Avoid them or, at least, avoid their HDTV service as I have done. I’m surprised they haven’t been sued in some class action lawsuit, but no doubt one will be coming at some point.
I switched from Dish network to Verizon. I had Verizon FIOS installed with a “bundled” package on May 10, 2008. The installer split the Verizon signal between my HDTV and my new high speed Verizon internet router, using an existing 75 ohm cable that Dish used to connect my HDTV.From the beginning with Verizon, the quality of the TV signals were disappointing. Pictures would break up. A Verizon on-demand movie was so bad i turnd it off. The Internet seemed unsually slow for a 15kb connection. On May 16, I had Dish reinstall their service to my TV on May 16, 2008. The Dish installer said that Dish does not recommend splitting a HDTV signal and a digital internet conection. I called Verizon;s “customer service” representative to report that I was electing to cancel the TV portion of the “package” ( under the contract I had 30 dayks to cancel) I asked the Verizon rep if we could make a deal for a slower internet speed (5kb) and local and long distance phone service. We did, but the representative was rude and defensive. Their rep did agree to install a direct cable directly to my computer router as I refused to split the TV signal. When the Verizon installer came yesterday he told me that Verizon gets many complaints about their customer service people. As soon as their was a direct dedicated cable to each component (the internet router and the HDTV), things were find. Watch out for Verizon. I wouldn’t recommend VIOS, at least for HDTV. If you do get it, don’t let them split the signal.
I’ve had Verizon triple-play since January. After four service calls, it almost works. Whenever watching a live sports broadcast, I get a rectangular black picture-in-picture-like (I don’t have PIP capability) where I see the show all around it. It will eventually start showing letters like someone is transmitting. There reps have been less than helpful — it goes away for about 10 seconds when I change the audio. Anyone else having this oddity?
Verzon Fios came to my neighborhood in mid 07, (Beaverton, Oregon) and I have read some scary things here. I currently use Comcast for Internet and TV. A friend of mine said that when FiOS comes to our area to GET IT!!! Well, now I am afraid to make the change. Can someone out there tell me of any positive experiences with Verizon FiOS?