Short-circuited: Verizon's hurry up and wait
When carriers hold your business hostage, all you can do is shake your fist and yell at the sky
Follow @pveneziaIf Verizon's data services were a restaurant, the menu would have a half-dozen vague choices, there would be a single waiter for the whole dining room, and the food would take three months to arrive -- and you'd be served something you didn't order.
I've been doing WAN designs and build outs for more than half my life. I've assembled more frame-relay networks than you can shake a stick at, alongside point-to-point WANs, MPLS, fiber, whatever. The constant problem throughout all those years and all those networks was the carrier. Place an order with Verizon for a T1, you might get an install date a month out, which I suppose could be reasonable. However, carriers appear to treat those install dates as the day to start -- not finish -- the installation.
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Case in point: I have a few 100Mbit circuits that I need dropped into data centers in two different states on the East Coast. Verizon is the carrier for both sites, though the local offices are presumably run by different managers and different working groups. However, both sites are already a month behind their installation dates, with no promised end. At first they couldn't find their own gear in one building, then they invented a problem in another building regarding a wiring closet that didn't exist. In that same building, they couldn't find the conduit that had been there for years and already carried a half-dozen Verizon circuits from the demarc to the data center.
They followed this up by claiming the necessary hardware wasn't available and it might be a month or more before they could install it. Keep in mind that I'm writing this at the end of June and the orders were placed at the end of April. At this rate, I'll be lucky to see functioning data circuits by Labor Day.
Yet there's no alternative. There's nobody else to call. There is simply no other option than to shake your fist at the sky and decry the de facto monopoly granted to Verizon and the other regional carriers. They have absolutely no interest in providing better -- or, some might say, even adequate -- service. Why should they? There's no competition. What am I going to do -- run the fiber myself?
The upshot of all this is that projects get pushed back continuously, existing contracts expire, leading to budgeting problems, and progress is hampered. While it's not incumbent on the carrier to move heaven and earth to get circuits installed as soon as possible, it should be incumbent on them to at least give the appearance of trying.
