A Cautionary Tale (About Verizon)

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Wavelengths

A cautionary tale

By Glenn Bischoff

November 3, 2006

In the three years I have been writing columns for MRT -- and for three years prior to that for sister publication Telephony -- I have refrained from pontificating on personal tales of woe regarding telecommunications service providers, believing there are far better uses for the space. I'm deviating from that stance today, because I think a recent experience has relevance in terms of some of the debate ensuing right now concerning the future of public-safety communications.

Perhaps you have seen the television advertisement Verizon Wireless has been running that touts the carrier's nationwide wireless broadband service. The ad is clever: Several office workers, gathered for a meeting, playfully discuss whether the service truly is nationwide. When one of the gathered confirms the service indeed is available in Las Vegas, the boss slaps on the shades and bolts.

At the end of the ad, one of the workers is depicted in a moving vehicle, surfing the Web at lightning speed -- so fast, in fact, that Verizon's service as depicted in the ad would put any cable service to shame. Of course, anyone viewing the ad would take this with a giant grain of salt -- ads often take creative liberties. For instance, ads showcasing the products of any one of the national hamburger chains indeed make those products look like something fit for a king. When you receive the real deal, your immediate reaction is to consider whether that moment might be a good time to start that diet you've been putting off.

So, when I signed up for Verizon's service earlier in the year -- I travel a lot and thought it would come in handy in airports and convention centers -- I had no grand illusions. I figured the quality would be somewhere between dial-up and cable service. And I was right -- at least in the beginning. It wasn't great, but it also wasn't bad, and you can't beat the convenience of wireless.

Soon after, however, the service significantly degraded -- specifically by constantly going dormant, even when I was actively surfing the Web. After putting up with this for a while -- you have no idea how frustrating it was -- I returned to the store and talked to a customer service representative, who had no clue as to what might be causing the problem. He put me on the phone with another technician who -- after about a half hour of troubleshooting -- confided that Verizon had reengineered the network architecture because many users were logging onto corporate VPNs and then not using the service much as they turned their attention to other tasks, causing an undue strain on network capacity. Specifically, Verizon programmed triggers that would put a user into dormant mode after 30 minutes of inactivity, he told me.

I eventually dropped the service, but not because I had any philosophical problem with the concept of dormancy. Rather, I cancelled because my connection was going dormant after 30 seconds, not 30 minutes, and Verizon couldn't figure out why. But that's not the point of this column.

What I find most interesting about this is that Verizon apparently recognized it didn't have network capacity sufficient to accommodate how its customers were using the service, so the carrier unilaterally changed the rules of engagement -- and then failed to tell its customers about the change.

This should sound an alarm through the public-safety sector. Verizon reportedly is wooing public-safety officials with a proposed public/private network in the 700 MHz band, utilizing 12 MHz of spectrum already allotted to public safety when broadcasters vacate the band in 2009. Moreover, Cyren Call Communications is enticing first responders with the notion of a public/private partnership that would result in commercial providers building a nationwide broadband network to public-safety specifications -- and granting first responders priority access to the airwaves.

The moral of this story is that commercial providers are always going to act based on what's best for their bottom lines and shareholders, not their customers. Accordingly, public-safety officials should be very wary of siren calls and -- better still -- make sure they hire very good attorneys capable of negotiating iron-clad quality-of-service provisions and hefty penalties for non-compliance before they partner with any commercial entity.