Verizon

Verizon is a telecommunications company providing wired and wireless telephone services, among others.

Opinions

Woozle 18:08, 30 Apr 2005 (CST)

We had a very bad experience with Verizon a couple of years ago. I'll try to dig up the details at a later date; this is just from memory.

I accidentally entered an old number for Earthlink's dial-up service into our gateway computer, which (at the time) was pretty much connected to the internet 24/7 via dial-up since we didn't yet have cable internet. Unfortunately, it turned out that this number had, not too long before, been officially moved out of our toll-free local service area and into the non-toll-free local service area. So there was a small per-minute charge for connection time -- something under a penny per minute, I think. There was, however, no change in the way the number was dialled -- you still didn't have to put a "1" or an area code in front of it. So we merrily reconnected to the internet and had no clue we were being charged until the bill showed up next month, with a charge for about $600 of "local toll" calls . They did not list the numbers called, either, so it was only after some investigation that we figured out that it was the Earthlink number.

Upon figuring this out, I immediately checked Earthlink's web site for the latest numbers for our area, and changed the number in the dialler. So now "all" we have to deal with is that $600 phone bill, right? Well... another one came in, now totalling about $1200... but I figured (having to guess a bit, since they didn't list when these diamond-plan calls had been made) that maybe this was the bill for the calls made between the previous bill and when I changed the number. So I took no further action, aside from getting ready to ask Verizon to remove the charge.

And then a third bill came in, and the total was still higher (I seem to recall that it ultimately got to around $3000, though that's inconsistent with the other numbers; as I said, I need to find the actual bills). I frantically double-checked the dialler and found that, of course, my "change" to the dial-up number somehow hadn't been saved; it was still dialling up caviar and truffles for us. This time, after making the change, I rebooted, reconnected, and watched to see that it actually dialled the "new", correct number.

Verizon flatly refused to remove the charge. I wrote them letters, called them and spoke with several different people... no go. (The story of what happened to the charge after that is... another story; it was fortunately on a number which belonged to a former resident of the house, and ultimately not our responsibility, although I did my darnedest to fix the problem anyway.)

Verizon's sins in this case consist of the following:

• Having such a thing as a "local toll area" which charges for calls without requiring you to dial a prefix ("1" or an area code)
• Listing only the total of charges for such calls, rather than itemizing
• Refusing to negotiate

Rating: yuck. Avoid.