To the Editor:
On the night of June 11, 2017, approximately 45 Verizon DSL customers who live in the Quansoo neighborhood of Chilmark lost their Wi-Fi service. The service was not restored until the night of June 26. We went more than two weeks without service. And to add to the frustration, no one knew why.
(Yes, we still use DSL. We didn’t even have that until 2010. Quansoo is a very rural area of Chilmark between South Road and the ocean, which has no alternative to DSL because Comcast has refused to cable this area, even though they recently told Congressman Keating’s office that “the entire island is cabled.”)
I called Verizon customer service immediately, and spoke to a very polite person in India who told me, “Indeed there is an outage, and service will be restored by 2:15 pm tomorrow.” Every day I called, and every day I was told, “Your service is out because of an outage, but we estimate it will be back by 2:15 pm today.” Every single time, I was given the same answer. And every single time it came from a delightfully polite man or woman, from an office in India, who reported what the computer told them to report. They didn’t know they were telling little lies because they were never told what was going on over here.
I tried everything I could to reach someone in the U.S., and could not reach anyone. I finally called the billing office of Verizon and did speak to someone in a U.S. office, only to be told that they knew there was an outage and we would be credited for loss of service, “but check your next bill to be sure.”
Everyone from Verizon was polite and cheerful, but no one could explain what the problem was.
We knew that there were local technicians working on the problem, because we saw them. In fact, one of our neighbors, John Healy, was working on it for hours and hours every day. He explained he was waiting for a part, but was experimenting with other solutions.
I finally called our congressman, Bill Keating, and asked if his office had any contacts at Verizon corporate. His Hyannis office contacted an executive at Verizon who contacted me and said he would get on it immediately.
Meanwhile, thinking “outside the box,” John Healy was able to find a part from another area in Chilmark, and had begun the tedious effort of splicing the hundreds of tiny wires that were required to join that switch box to our service. He restored our service on the night of June 26 after a brutally long day of very hard work.
Sixteen days without service is a very long time. Many of my neighbors are as upset as I am that Verizon corporate neither informed any of us about the nature of the problem, nor gave us any realistic estimate of the time it would take to repair it. Their apparent disdain for their DSL customers on MV is shocking. If not for the focus of John Healy, and those technicians who worked with him, we would still be unable to access the Internet without using massive amounts of expensive data. Thanks to John and all of those local techs who finally got the job done.
John Verret
Chilmark
You called your congressman? Wow, I never knew internet was a constitutional right.