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.
Why NOT FIOS
October, 2011
1) You loose your phone if you loose power or cable.
Remember the old days when you could loose power, water, or all utilities, but the phone still worked? No longer.
One of the many things they do not tell you when you order, and may not even during the install, is that your phone is moved from the reliable copper wire to the un-reliable coaxal cable that requires power from your home. If you loose cable you cannot report it. And if you loose power, you loose your phone after 8 hours on batter backup. You cannot call for help or find out what is happening around the neighbourhood.
2) You loose existing e-mail.
Another thing they don’t tell you is that if you have existing e-mail service and do not switch to their’s, when you switch your computer to the FIOS internet you can still receive e-mail but can’t send it out.
It turns out that this is because FIOS has taken it upon themselves to block you from using port 25. It’s to “protect you” from sending spam, even though any port can be used for that and even though 99% of their residential customers have no knowledge of STMP servers, ports, or are unlikely to send spam from home.
Also without telling you they block port 80 inbound, apparently to “protect you” from having a website on your home computer though gosh knows why. Even the installing technician didn’t know about the blockages and technical support had to escalate the call before the cause of my e-mail problem was discovered.
If you have always had your own e-mail service that’s using port 25 to send to its SMTP server, it simply stops working. One fix is to pay for a business account instead of a residential one as it is not blocked. (Sic.)
Another is to switch to FIOS’s SMTP server because it receives outgoing e-mails on port 465. To do this means you have to sign up for their e-mail service whether you did during initial install or not and wether you’ll ever use it or not, and even though you’re normal, receiving e-mail account (the POP service) remains the original service. Part of the sign-up is to require an e-mail address to which they can send their spam. That’s right. The same FIOS that righteously protects the world from your spam requires that you take theirs or you can’t continue using your existing e-mail account that uses Outlook or Thunderbird.
You will then have to change your e-mail client’s configuration to use their SMTP server, port, protocol, and the account / password you just created. But only for outgoing email, not incoming. If you change back from FIOS, you’ll have to change these back. And if you don’t know how to do any of that, you have to call FIOS technical support to tell you, if you can find that number.
3) You can have installed, and be billed for, a different configuration from what you ordered.
Sales office, technicians, technical support, and billing all seem to live in different worlds. I ordered only cable and internet and the technician who came said his order was to install two converters: one “standard” and one “DVR.” I asked if there was any impact on the price and the technician said he’s not allowed to talk about pricing, it’s whatever order was agreed to.
The next week I received a letter from FIOS saying I’d be billed $125 a month instead of the $95 I’d ordered.. I had to call the business office to straighten out the order and reduce the bill to what had been intended. The DVR converted had been arbitrarily added by Verizon at additional cost with no word to me.
4) You get contradictory statements about what you get, and FIOS may renege.
For the initial order I was told I’d get a standard converter free for as long as I lived at that address. This was affirmed by a followup billing letter. When I called to clarify the order and correct the billing they said they that offer was not available to my area and they would not do it: the standard converter would be an additional $10 from the original quote.
5) You don’t know what you’re ordering.
When you phone up to order, they try not to tell you what the options are by obscuring them in “packages” and “specials.” You may know that you only want internet, but you can’t have just that. You will also get TV and phone, and they don’t mention the phone.
They tell you a price for “packages” of “services”, but not that “service” only means internet speed and number of channels, not necessarily that the cable converter is an additional monthly charge.
Internet speed and sets of cable TV channels are bundled, not separate. You pay for what you don’t want.
So you can wind up with many HD channels but a converter not capable of HD, and the technician who installs it is instructed not to say anything about pricing so, even if he tells you what is technically what you get no basis for a decision.
6) Even Verizon doesn’t know what you have.
Twice I called to have my phone service restored; twice the service desk swore up and down that my phone was on copper wire, not FIOS; twice a service man came and swore up and down my phone was on FIOS, not copper.
7) You become their delivery boy.
When I cancelled service I asked if a technician would pick up their equipment. They said no, they’d send me boxes for me to send it all to them.
to all of the customers with vod pixelation and tv works FINE. the first thing you want to do is verify with the verizon that your speed profile for both data and video are programmed correctly from the guys on the inside. if that is correct, the next thing to do would be to have an outside tech check the speeds coming directly out of the ONT and router. If the speeds are correct inside and out, the problem would will be one of three things(the cable box, coax wiring, or a splitter). approach tble in that order and somewhere along the line your tble will be fixed…