Sleazy Verizon Blind Upsell

Last October, I was juggling three separate Verizon accounts, two landlines and a wireless account for my business phones. Several different attempts to get on Verizon's OneBill program fell short of success in 2010. In addition I'd had placed dozens of calls to complain about my spotty DSL service. It seemed every time it rained, my Net would go down. Perhaps this is why.

Living history--state of the art Verizon junction box

This rat's nest of a junction box is Verizon's sorry excuse for our 21st century information infrastructure. It provides the 25 homes on my side of the street in our fashionable little urban neighborhood with "high speed" DSL and landline service. I've never gotten anything close to the advertised 3Mbps, even when it doesn't rain. And when it does, several service techs always come out (the next day) and jiggle the cables or use the repair guys version of a hairdryer and it works again until the next rain. When I ask them what we can do to prevent outages again, the responses vary from contact the PUC to wait for FIOS. FIOS, hmm, there's another sandpaper rub. Back in the early 90's I was working on a post-divestiture video for Verizon employees and came across of a clip of Ivan Seidenburg promising Philadelphia "ubiquitous fiber to the curb" in 1996. Hot damn!

Do the math Ivan, 15 years have come and gone and WHERE'S THE FIBER? Eighteen blocks from the old Bell of PA HQ and we don't have it and nobody at Verizon can tell us when we will. My neighbor Grove, a purchasing director for an aerospace firm who telecommutes on Fridays, found this out the hard way. He called Verizon last year, got bounced to the typical 5 different CSRs, got disconnected twice, (I'm sorry sir this is not my department, let me transfer you, click, errrr, If you'd like to place your call, please try again). He spent an infuriating hour and a half of his life to find out what I could've told him over a leisurely glass of wine, that Verizon is writing down the costs of their investment in copper wire and is dragging their feet for the sake of the balance sheet. It's not a technology issue. It's a money issue. Grove, never one to suffer fools, voted with his feet and promptly canceled all his Verizon services and is now a happy (by comparison) Clear customer.  I feel for you buddy, but the time you wasted is chump change compared to my experiences.

Much more Sleaze after the Jump!

c.010101 EOY Round-up Home for the Holidays

Mamma told me there’d be days like these.

In the year that the term defriend became the lingua franca de annum in a publication as august as the New Oxford English Dictionary, we’re certainly witnessing the dawn of the social networking era and its inevitable hyper-self-absorption as witnessed in this subsequent navel-gazing debate over whether the announcement actually meant to say “unfriend.” Unfriend/Defriend? Am I unconcerned or deconcerned? Ask me next year.

When I started cleaning my email e-Holiday card list I went first to my own modest social network on Facebook, then took a dive into LinkedIn and even Skype and Plaxo for hard to find colleagues who’ve changed addresses, jobs or locations. The social networks have proven remarkably agile at this task and I suspect will become moreso as their ubiquity increases. Gone are the days when you had to endure pop-up, spyware crap laden “Look-up applications” in order to update an email ad' or a phone number. The S-Net represents the first, albeit baby step toward each one of us being able to manage our own presence and information profile effectively and for this they are important and good. My first pass was able to garner me a brand new line on a friend I hadn’t seen in 32 years and current emails for 30 job-hoppers who hadn’t remembered to send me “I’ve moved” notices.

Once I nailed that problem down, (about two days over a 1900 entry address list), I tackled a hair-puller that has plagued me for four years. This one involved how Outlook sends graphic files. I created my nice little e-card ...

 ... but repeated sends revealed that somehow Outlook was mashing it up and sending this

Ugh!!!

My seasonal nightmare four years running. Tried saving in all formats and all resolutions. Always the SOS.  I could find nothing in the online literature that suggested why this was so, but a combination of research and trial and error and dumb ### luck finally yielded a way to insert a modestly attractive gif file into the Outlook message envelope and not have it look like hash after it’s sent. For those of you on my e-card list. This is why you got it today, rather than a week ago. For those of you who employ high power graphics programs and remailers or software designed to block such email, you don’t care, so read on. Anybody interested in how I did it can contact me. I’ll spill all for the benefit of science.

InterFACEbook

My 15 year old asked today whether it was random chance that Facebook made it so big rather than MySpace or other social sites and I asked him why he thought it was so. He thought for a moment then said perhaps it was “the menu and stuff” which I took to mean “interface” and we had a “teachable moment” about interface design and its importance to personal information management. His is the interface generation. They juggle icons and menus like my generation manipulates words and phrases. We talk about how much catching up they have to do to bring depth and nuance to their conversations but our generation has just as much catching up to bring conversation to our depth and nuance.

Nobody has really monetized social network applications yet, but I have a feeling that the social networks have created the next great wave in personal computing and that we’re just on the lift of the swell of the Web 3.0, the “you web” where you can do everything from start a revolution to learn what your f&f had for dinner.
The social networks bring another small but not so minor innovation to the desktop, particularly if you use Outlook, like much of corporate America. Using a plug-in named Xobni, (“zobni”) it interfaces with your social network and if the api stars align, you get a little thumbnails for your contacts.

Google Wave promises to slam all that together under the ubiquitous Google umbrella as the next big e-thing and while the big G offers users tremendous utility for the show-stopping price of “free” you have to worry about how much of your life you’re willing to entrust to the G cloud, from search history, to documents, to emails to social networks, before they “own” you. This from the company that was so willing to support the Great Firewall of China. They don’t exactly call to mind the hard-bitten media moguls of the 20^th Century who stood on free speech as if it were inviolable and sent grizzled reporters and publishers to prison singing Cumbayah before they’d allow a government entity to dictate to them. I don't know how good I feel about putting all my eggs in a cloud. Strange days indeed.

There are sources of stuff “they don’t want you to know about” But you have to go looking. My top 5 choices for stories to follow in 2010 are:

1.      Do you really think the Obama administration will have the balls to go after financial reform when the Treasury Department is just another revolving door for Wall Streeters?

2.      Who the ### is Joe Lieberman to take the public option off the table and why the Dems are allowing the Senator from The Insurance State to steal true healthcare reform from us?

3.      Verizon promised me fiber to the curb in 1996. Who do I have to #### to get my FIOS in 2010?

4.      Save a tree and save our children’s’ spines. When will Amazon wake up and put a Kindle in every student’s backpack? 

5.      The strange particles that bombard us when politics and science collide over global warming. Will we get the real story before they ship us all off to Mars?

These are my hot buttons. You have the right to your own damned buttons but things like these really @!$$ me off and when they’re deliberately under-reported that really @!$$es me off even more. Stories like these are not right at your fingertips. You have to stretch a little. Stretching is good. Testing your calcium against diverse beliefs (as in a couple of above links) is good for the ethical bone structure and results in shining white teeth.

Make 2010 the You Web Year. Make the “You Web” yours and put it/yourself out there for the world to see. You even have the right to go through other people’s stuff (within limits they’ve established.) Most recently, you now have the right to aggregate and interface to satisfy your own peculiarities and curiosities. Poke it, prod it. Ride it for all its worth. It’s never been easier, more fun or more popular.

Just remember the words of Horace, the Roman poet who urged us and all schoolboys to “carpe diem” also warned “Semel emissum volat irrevocabile verbum.”

Once released, the word flies (or in this case drops) irrevocably.

To all Friends and Family on more than one continent who care enough to keep coming back to read, mille mille grazia.

To all …

Happy END OF 2009 with BIG HOPES for Happier 2010!

State of the Art--circa 20th Century

If you care about the state of our nation's telecommunications infrastructure or just your own service, you should watch this Charlie Rose interview with Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg and then read the comment I posted. If you can't locate my response, it is reprinted below.

I've been following telco history for a while and clearly recall Bell of PA promising in the late 80's to bring fiber to the curb by 1996, not 2001 as Mr. Seidenberg suggests. And while Verizon is tearing up vast trunks of copper laid but never used under Philadelphia's Broad St. (and passing those costs on to consumers), I still can't get FIOS service to my relatively affluent urban neighborhood, a few blocks from the old B of PA HQ. Let's see. What else can't I get?

It's been raining here and the old copper junction box in the middle of my street is a rat's nest of bad splices that go out when the weather gets bad, so until tonight, my high speed internet had been mostly off 5 evenings running. While I could get a Vodafone chip to use overseas on unlocked Moto phones, there's no Verizon tech solution to get those same phones on to the proprietary Verizon network. Seidenberg's assertion that the phone makers pick and choose their networks is a little disingenuous. Telco(network and device) technologies leapfrog over previous iterations and provide jarring rather than smooth upgrade paths. If computer co's followed the same fitful model, can you imagine how few of today's (taken for granted) computing advances we’d have?

Verizon's tech support and trouble ticket resolution is often infuriating if you're a power user and I can only assume even moreso if you're not. Their upselling on FIOS packages confused the heck out of my senior citizen parents resulting in services they didn't need and hefty charges they didn't expect. It bordered on deceptive.

Seidenberg promised to roll out G4 later this year. I'm waiting to see how long it really takes and what I'll have to give up to get it. Like all of the second/third/fourth generation Baby Bell reincarnates this is still a company that only reacts when spurred by what little competition it gets. But since post-divestiture, it remains a quasi-monopoly and is largely unconcerned about competition, its primary business model is driven mostly by amortization schedules of its aging but expensive infrastructure. Consumer clamor for choice, open architecture and state-of-the-art services take a distant third as a business driver. At least in Europe and Asia, government oversight of and investment in their telco monopolies drives innovation that we stateside won't see for years. Telemedicine and other futuristic bandwidth on demand services that Seidenberg was riffing on are concepts that have been around since the 80's. Though their service is fairly reliable, it used to be better.

This not a company on the cusp of the telecommunications revolution, rather it has been dragged kicking and screaming into the 21st century. In this business sector only two things spur innovation—government oversight or true competition. Since Verizon has neither, it is content to stay its uninspired course.