Did I say hate? No, actually it's more like a visceral loathing. Every single encounter I have with them seems to go badly, and yet? I keep buying service from them. Kind of sounds like a personal problem, doesn't it?
This time, I increased my FiOS speed from 15/2 to 25/15. I checked the speed before and after the upgrade date at speedtest.net, and found that it did not change when they said it would.
First I wrote to FiOS Customer Service. They wrote back telling me to call an 800 number. Exactly what difference does it make if they talk to me in person? I guess I made clear what I thought of that by eventually losing the email.
Then I submitted a trouble ticket on their website. This netted me a call, 8 business days later. I wasn't here so the guy left a message saying they would need to check some settings. Hey, we might actually get somewhere! So I called back with moderately high hopes, which of course was my first mistake.
I started out by offering the guy a choice of a) a Vista system connected directly to the internet or b) a Mac connected via a powerline Ethernet adapter. He said it didn't matter, so we used the Mac since that's my system. He connected to my Mac via a screen sharing program. He poked around a bit but obviously didn't really know what to do. He made me close all running programs, and cleared out Safari's history files, which didn't make any difference (seriously, does dumping cache *ever* actually make any difference???).
At this point he decided that the problem must be that the Mac is connected via the aforementioned Ethernet adapter, through an Airport Base Station, then to the Verizon router. Now, it's not a crazy idea that all that could be slowing down the line, but I told him several times that this system gets exactly the same numbers from speedtest.net as the directly-connected Vista system so that can't possibly be the problem... except in his mind, it was. So off I went upstairs to try again.
He had more options on Vista - apparently even though Verizon nominally supports Macs, they don't actually have any tools written for them and so here he was able to run through his canned script and "optimize my internet connection". While we were waiting for a reboot I asked him what we would do about the Mac if all this helped; he spouted a bunch of nonsense that basically amounted to "I haven't the faintest idea, but I'm going to do my best to make it not my problem".
All the optimizing didn't make a bit of difference. Huge surprise. So then he went to the TCP/IP Analyzer at speedguide.net and pointed out that the RWIN value is too low, and that his tools should have fixed that, and that Vista must have some kind of firewall or something blocking him from changing it. I didn't bother asking him what RWIN was because it was clear he wouldn't have a clue. According to the site "RWIN (TCP Receive Window) is a buffer that determines how much data the receiving computer is prepared to get at one time." Does that really sound like something one should have to tweak on a home computer???
Now, I know that speed test sites are notoriously unreliable. While he was doing all of this he went to speed.io, which gave radically different numbers from speedtest.net (much better on the download, much worse on the upload). But each site is fairly consistent, and I expected to see *some* increase when the line speed was turned up.
His last piece of advice? Call Microsoft to see if they could help figure out what in Vista is blocking his tools. And call Apple to ask them to optimize Safari and my Airport Base Station for me. Yea, right. Hello Apple? This kid at Verizon told me to call you, said my networking problems are your responsibility. I'd probably have hearing damage from the laughter.
*heavy sigh* Sadly, their only competition is Comcast, unless I want to go for ultra expensive business service, and they are no better. So all I can do is vent here, while I ponder what my next step should be.
Update: I posted about my troubles at dslreports.com. I'm still not 100% sure but it appears that my connection speed actually *is* what it's supposed to be - it was the speed test website I was using to check it that's bad. You can read about that here. But I don't think that makes the incompetence of the Verizon tech any more forgivable.
