VZW Finally Admits What We've Known for Months

[dfizzo]

VZW CRO Fran Shammo acknowledged significant LTE slowdowns in major cities on Tuesday 11/12/2013.

So do NOT let VZW support get away with lying anymore that they have seen no problems that there is "nationwide shortage." They have been lying for months as users have reported problem after problem continually asking for info about our phones, our locations etc. attempting to blame ANYTHING but their own infrastructure. If you get a support person telling you that the problem isn't with them bring this up, ask to be elevated to a supervisor and demand an explanation for deceptive business practices. Inform them that you will be filing complaints with relevant agencies

They didn't just figure out this was a problem on Tuesday, they must have been looking into this for weeks if not months all the while telling customers "it's your phone...it's your location...it's somehow YOUR problem not ours."

So how about it VZW? When did you realize there was a problem with your infrastructure? Give us a date so we can figure out which of us were blatantly lied to when we tried to tell you something was wrong.

[jroeder]

It is your location. They said MAJOR CITIES. So its because of your location that there is a slow down, which is due to high congestion. So the towers in those cities are just not capable of supporting that much usage at any given time. If you use it at 2 a.m. I have a feeling your going to have much faster speeds than at 2 p.m.  So there is not technically a problem with the network, everything is working how it should be, you just can't expect 250,000 customers to not affect the speeds of the network.

[dfizzo]

They repeatedly denied there was a network problem...period.

They insisted the issues must be device related which we now see was

blatantly false. And we're not talking, at least in my area, a "slowdown"

we're talking service so slow that not even emails could get through from

roughly 10AM till 4PM or so. This wasn't "oh I can't stream Netflix" this

was "I can't get email to come through" which is MUCH LESS demanding on the

network. And by location I mean they tried to blame it on "being in an

office building" or similar causes not "Network congestion in metropolitan

areas."

They insisted the problems were CUSTOMER related (device problems or

locations of that particular customer interm of surroundings or

indoor/outdoor) not "metropolitan areas are currently experiencing heavy

network congestion." That would have been understandable.

[jroeder]

Okay, I get your point now. I live in a smaller city so I do not know what the tech's say about your speed. I was just going off the original post. My apologies. It wouldn't necessarily be the the tech reps fault. They probably thought nothing was wrong according to the systems so that does seem very shady that the higher up's would hide from their own reps.

[Ann154]

jroeder wrote:

Okay, I get your point now. I live in a smaller city so I do not know what the tech's say about your speed. I was just going off the original post. My apologies. It wouldn't necessarily be the the tech reps fault. They probably thought nothing was wrong according to the systems so that does seem very shady that the higher up's would hide from their own reps.

Need to know. How's is this any different from any other corporate company and they conversations at the executive level?

[jroeder]

It's not any different, I never said it was. I just wish they could tell the frontline employees so that way the customers can have a better idea of what the problem is, rather than telling customers to buy a new phone or run outside to try and get a better signal/speed. With reps telling customers nothing is wrong yet the executives know there is, always leads to a bad customer experience and a community forum filled with unhappy customers.

[dfizzo]

Fair enough, and I agree that is very unlikely the front line CSR's were at

fault. But it's clear that something was known about this and it wasn't

getting communicated to the customers. Which is why I say elevate if a CSR

tells you "We have no reports of a network problem." Get as far up the

chain as you can and then make sure they are aware you know that there IS a

network problem.

[Noverator]

http://www.gottabemobile.com/2013/11/13/a-faster-4g-lte-experience-will-be-coming-to-verizons-custom...

[dfizzo]

Faster? At this point I'd settle for USEFUL. True it's gotten better in the

last month but it's still often better for me to switch my phone to 3G only

to get useful speeds. I'm happy they've acknowledged the problem and are

working to fix it (we'll see if they actually do fix it). But that doesn't

change the fact that for a long time we were constantly being asked about

our individual devices or specific locations (inside a building, surrounded

by tall buildings) with nary a mention of there being generalized network

problems in major metro areas. This shows there was an attempt by Verizon

to bury the idea that they were having generalized network issues, trying

to pass the buck to individual customers by suggesting their devices were

to blame or the problem was otherwise isolated to specific customers.

THAT would have been nice information to have. A simple "We are experiening

higher than expected demand in several major metro areas which is resulting

in network congestion. We are working to implement fixes to this problem to

increase capacity. Until these fixes are in place your 4G performance in

crowded metro areas may be slower than expected" would have gone a LONG way.

Instead they chose to act as if there was ZERO issues with the network, NOT

disclose this problem while customers were asking and complaining

continuously about slower than expected 4G performance (unreasonably slow,

obviously I expect slower speeds in more crowded areas, but this was slow

to the point of being useless) in downtown areas.