by James Boyd

Created on: April 13, 2010

Testimonies: Nightmare home networking stories I have Verizon DSL and have used it for years. When I told my wife I had signed us up for DSL to replace our dial-up (which cost $99 a year for unlimited access) she told me it was foolish to waste that money when our Internet connection worked very well. One week after DSL was set up, she told me we would never go back to dial-up.

It worked just fine until recently. I started losing my Internet connection on a regular basis. It was very frustrating for all of us. It would disconnect, usually for just a few seconds, and then the connection would be re-established. It is an inconvenience if you are reading email or checking out news stories. If you are playing an online game, however, when you disconnect from the Internet, you disconnect from the game server, and you lose the game.

I called Verizon and eventually navigated the system to get to Internet tech support. Over the next ten days or so, I had to call them several times. After the second call, they gave me a direct number that bypasses a lot of the options menu. Eventually, an agent gave me his direct extension number, with instructions to leave a voice mail which he would respond to the same day. I don’t know much about the agents in tech support for Verizon wireless. I have only had to call once in the last five years, and that was a minor matter. But their people who provide tech support for broadband Internet services are outstanding. Every one of them I talked to was helpful and knowledgeable. It can be very distressing to call a company for technical support and find yourself talking to an agent who knows a lot less about the subject than you do.

Because the problem was not definitely solved on my first call, I received a callback from a manager the next day. He said they would put my connection on a 24 hour continuous monitor to check for problems. They sent a tech who did not know much about what he was working on. He mumbled something about interference on the line, claimed he had fixed it, and left. The guy really did not understand Internet connections and networking equipment. He informed me I could not use my router because the modem was also a router and you cannot have two routers. When I informed him that I had set the modem as a bridge so there was no conflict, he looked at me like I was speaking Greek.

More calls and another tech was sent out. He replaced a switch and connected my DSL directly, so I no longer needed filters on my

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