Almost two years ago, the wife and I decided to switch from AT&T to Verizon for our wireless service. Among our many gripes with AT&T was poor coverage at our workplaces and spotty coverage between there and our home. And it’s amazing how situations change; we both now work primarily from home while raising out young one. Initially, we were satisfied enough with our Verizon coverage to ditch our landline — also provided by AT&T. We were almost giddy when dumping AT&T for a second time. Our customer service experience with them has disappointing to say the least. But that’s another story.
However, about a year ago we started noticing an increase in dropped calls while at home. It became a large enough annoyance that we decided to call Verizon customer service for help. Per presumed guidelines, the Verizon tech walked us through the process of updating our carrier settings — a process which only took a few minutes per phone. The tech assured us that this would alleviate our issue. We continued for several more months and didn’t notice much of an improvement. I was hesitant to call them back for fear that I wouldn’t like their response. But last week I finally made the call. The first person I spoke to Dan me through that same process but eventually handed me off to someone a bit more technical — a very small bit. This person suggested that I invest in a “network extender”, a device designed to utilize my Wi-Fi for calls made while inside the house. I told the guy that I was not keen to spend additional money on this type of solution which, ironically, would be dependent upon my AT&T-provided DSL. After asking for another option, the tech offered to open a ticket with the network support team which would be responsible for analyzing the signal. One possible outcome of this ticket would be a possible release from our contract if the signal doesn’t meet standards OUTSIDE our home. They cannot guarantee service inside of structures, he explained. Finally, he gave me the ticket number and said I should hear back in about 3 days. So I waited.
During this time, I started investigating other options including 3rd party cell phone range extenders. But these solutions seemed difficult to install and offered no guarantees of improvement. I finally received a call back from Verizon with the results of their analysis. I had expected for them to confirm that the signal outside our home was within tolerance and that we were SOL. But I was wrong. They simply confirmed that there are unexpected signal fluctuations in our area and that they will address it soon. No additional information was provided and that my support ticket was closed. While I am still lacking closure to the issue — dropped calls continue — I am somewhat pleased with Verizon. It would appear that they followed through with my request and provided an honest assessment of the situation. I can’t say what AT&T would have done in the same situation; I can only speculate that I would be disappointed as I so often have. So for the time being we will stick by Verizon and hopefully the dropped calls will become a thing of the past. Time will tell.
