Sorry DRED, but I do not find it funny at all that Verizon is able to charge for services not used. Even if you use it and do not use it enough, they still charge you.
As we cannot get land line service from anyone else, we are simply dropping it. They have a lock on high speed Internet service as well, so we will end up with either satellite or Sprint's wireless service. Nether of which is all that great, but I'll be damned if Verizon is going to get another nickle from me.
Well - I am out of contract now with Verizon so I can tell you a little about them as I no longer collect pay from them.
1st - their employees sit around all day squeaking about their pay, benefits, time off etc etc etc. It's not like another company where EVERYone is overworked and the company is getting their money's worth. You could literally dismantle 50% of the verizon employees and still have the same level of service.
2nd- Copper vs Fios. There is a big war internally between these groups. They do not like each other and they do not play well with each other. They are the LEC (local exchange carrier) for millions and unfortunately have people by the you know whats. Knowing this, the copper group drags their feet to do stuff while the fios group is rushing aroudn trying to get the infrastructure up so they can actually turn a profit some year for this extremely expensive adventure!
3rd- Verizon is finally getting smart and realizing that they can get rid of people making 80k per year with 5 weeks vacation that sit around an squeak all day, for people that are hungry to work, give them 2 weeks vacation and pay them 40k or less! HOWEVER, this too is causing a major rift and of course - mix in unions and you have a quagmire of poo to get anything done.
I personally think they need to wipe all their employees out of the offices and start over. Too much hostility in the company that is spreading like a virus from employee to employee.
Now there are many many things good about this company and keep in mind that many of the people working there are from the older LEC days before Verizon took over, so they still have the same work ethic and customer service minded ethics.
All in all, I can't imagine they are going to be much better than many of the services out there.
The company I work for now does not like to hear people sitting on a PPOE connection whenever they are having remote access issues into our company. It's just another pain that we have to work through.
