Verizon
A follow-up on our Verizon woes
A couple weeks ago I wrote about my frustrations with Verizon’s service when it came to the issues my wife was having with her new iPhone. At the time, they were shipping out a new SIM card, in hopes that would fix the issue.
That SIM card showed up on a Friday afternoon, and the rest of that Friday was rather frustrating. When I installed the SIM card, it wouldn’t activate. 10-minute call to customer support and that problem was fixed. So then I tried calling the phone, but had the same issue as before - most calls were going straight to voice mail.
So later on that evening I tried the chat route for customer support. I spent nearly an hour on chat support with a second-level tech named Sonia. She tried a bunch of things, including disabling voice mail, to see if any of them would allow calls to consistently ring through. No such luck. She said she’d file a help ticket with the network engineers and follow up with me in a couple of days.
No sooner did I get off of chat with her than I realized that my wife’s voice mail hadn’t been set back up correctly… which meant that then not only would her phone not ring, but it wouldn’t get the voice messages either. Not acceptable. So, I called in to Verizon tech support. (For those of you counting, that’s three separate sessions with tech support on the same day.)
This time I got a friendly guy from Arkansas who spent 10 minutes getting voice mail fixed, and then another 45 trying to figure out why calls weren’t going through. He found a few more settings on his end that were screwed up, but nothing seemed to fix the issue. Eventually he gave up, confirmed that the help ticket had been filed, texted me that ticket number, and said good night.
We didn’t hear anything over the weekend, but on the following Monday I got a phone call from Sonia (the tech I’d chatted with on Friday). She told me that the network guys had investigated and said the network was working perfectly, so that it must be the phone. Verizon overnighted a new iPhone 5 out via Fedex.
Once the new phone showed up that Tuesday, it was a pretty quick process to swap the SIM card and restore the phone from a backup. I held my breath and dialed her number… and it rang. I hung up and dialed again. It rang again. A half-dozen calls later, the phone rang every time. Success! As she started using the phone she also found that some other things that seemed weird with the old phone were fixed on the new one. (For instance: the volume buttons weren’t adjusting call volume during a call.)
My conclusion: find the right Verizon techs and they’ll get things done. And the iPhone 5 is amazing, but given that we’re each on our second phone within the first two months, maybe Apple has a few quality issues to work out.
Verizon Wireless woes
Back around Thanksgiving my wife and I made the jump from US Cellular to Verizon, for the express purpose of getting iPhones. And I’ve gotta say, as a first-time iPhone owner: the iPhone 5 is fantastic. The hardware is exemplary. Everything happens quickly, the Apple software is (mostly) beautiful and (almost always) consistent, and the battery life… well, the battery life is almost unbelievable after my two years as a Galaxy S owner.
Over the past couple of weeks, though, we’ve noticed some issues with my wife’s telephone. Mine works just fine, but if you try to call her, about 90% of the time it’ll ring twice on your end and go straight to voice mail. She never even gets an indication that someone is trying to call. She can be in the same room as me, with good signal, etc, but while calls to me work just fine, calls to her get re-routed. (She gets texts just fine.)
So, I’ve entered the Verizon support hassle. First call to tech support started with 10 minutes on hold. After that a helpful support gal looked into some network settings, tried calling my wife’s phone, and after two consecutive calls got through, declared the phone fixed. Once we hung up I tried calling my wife from my phone and it went straight to VM. Then I tried calling her phone via Google Talk’s free calling service, and that, too, went straight to VM. Four times in a row.
My next attempt has been via @VZWSupport on Twitter. It took about two days to finally get some action from them, but after some short diagnostic questions they now have a new SIM card headed out to us via Fedex. Guess we’ll see if that solves the problem. A Google search for this issue leads me to believe that the new SIM card might just be step 1 in a longer tech-support dance, but seeing as it’s a new year I’ll try to hold out hope for a quicker solution.