My wife was told during last week’s cluster-f-word with Frontier FiOS that we should call customer service for a credit for our five-day-long outage of all services (phone, television, and internet). Last night, she placed said call.

We got a whopping $30 and change. Woo hoo. I guess we can order Chinese food with our windfall.

I repeat my earlier advice: if you are considering ordering Frontier FiOS, wait until they get their act together. Granted, you may be waiting for a very long time, but still …

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If you are in Texas or California and are considering switching to FiOS, I would advise you to wait. Seriously.

Verizon sold their stake in FiOS in those two states to Frontier Communications last year. Frontier took over at the beginning of April. You’d think that would leave plenty of time for Frontier to get acquainted with the ins and outs of FiOS service.

That doesn’t seem to be the case.

We have just suffered a five-day outage of our phone, internet (note new Associated Press non-capitalization), and TV service caused by the need for a new Optical Network Terminal (ONT) box. I won’t go into details, but Frontier at first sent a contracted tech who couldn’t get a new box due to lack of stock. They eventually sent a Frontier tech who replaced the box but was unable to activate it. We finally came back online yesterday, but not after a series of brain-wrenching experiences with Frontier’s “customer service” phone representatives.

As it turns out, there’s been a systemic problem with the activation of new ONT boxes in Texas and California for at least the last five days, if not longer. Some customers could still be out—a Frontier repairman told my wife we were one of the lucky few to be back online.

I am thoroughly dissatisfied with Frontier’s phone representatives, who seemed to be unable to find the status of any of the trouble tickets we were issued without at least a 30 minute wait. One of our phone calls stretched out to two hours. All I will say is that I’m glad we managed to find one technician and supervisor pairing who actually cared enough about our problem to stay in touch until we were back online.

Take care of your ONT boxes, Texas and California FiOS customers. If you need a new one, you could be down for quite some time. If you plan on getting new FiOS service, I’d suggest you wait until Frontier rectifies the ONT activation problem and improves their service.

These are my opinions. Your mileage may vary.

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