Sorry about the outage folks. See, a few days ago I noticed Verizon was offering a 25 megabit/sec up and 25 megabit/sec down FiOS deal for 100 bucks a month. Given that’s what I was paying for a 20 megabit/sec up and 5 megabit/sec down FiOS circuit, I decided to remedy this situation. I’ve done this a few times, and it’s always gone without a hitch. Suddenly you just find yourself upgraded to ludicrous speed.
This time the sales guy put in the order to change my account, over to a DHCP dynamic IP account, unbeknownst to me. I didn’t notice until everything suddenly went offline. A call to Verizon’s tech support quickly revealed the problem when the tech told me “I’m going to cancel all the leases and reset your line,” which prompted me to say “Leases? What leases? I have a static block. We don’t need no steenking leases!” But this was apparently not reflected in my new account information. Panic sets in. The tech can’t do anything without billing’s approval, and billing, who keep bankers hours, are already closed. This means I’ll be out for the night.
So this morning I called first thing at 9, when the billing people arrive, and thanks to the valiant efforts of Nicole at Verizon, we seem to be operational again. I was very worried due to some system issue or another, I would be unable to get back the same IP addresses, which would have protracted this outage another day or so, and maybe more for some people being fed by a DNS server who doesn’t honor cache expiration. So now we should be up and running again with the old IP block, much faster speed, and a 50 dollar account credit for the month.
I’ve generally been very happy with FiOS, and Verizon was very cooperative and apologetic once they realized their error. I’ll forgive a mistake that gets fixed smoothly. This is good, because I really only have two choices when it comes to high speed business Internet, and Verizon is definitely the lesser evil.
My only choice is Verizon DSL and that choice pretty much sucks.
Good to have you back. I was ready to send the search gators to look for you.
You should send the search gators after the Verizon guy who screwed up my order! :)
Winged Attack Gators shall be delivered! Look for the UPS truck tomorrow with the freshly one-armed driver.
“Suddenly you just find yourself upgraded to ludicrous speed.”
Looks like you went past ludicrous and into plaid.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NbrAy9f4Gc
I wish your Verizon people were my Verizon people. We have a T1 line that costs several hundred a month. We had a bad line somewhere and it took them 3 weeks to fix it. Keep in mind we pay lots of money for an SLA that beats FiOS, but it didn’t help. I couldn’t even get the bastards out to look at the problem for three days.
Fixed now. But not without serious headache.
I switched our company to FiOS from a T1. I’ve never found SLAs to be worth the paper they are printed on. FiOS has been reliable as hell otherwise.
The sausage-making that goes into SLAs is amazing. I got to sit in on a couple sessions of that once at a B2B level. So glad my phone has a mute function.
And then, five nines of the time, you end up with the sausage in a very uncomfortable place anyway (and I don’t mean the back seat of a VW bug).
Not a problem. My broken link detector on the blog was going really nuts for a bit (I apparently link you a lot) but everything looks smooth now on my end.