February 01, 2007

Wake Up, Verizon Wireless-- Your System is Coming Apart

My mobile phone service is from Verizon Wireless. They have the best network in the US, and for most of the past few years, I've been happy with them.

But in the past few months, I've noticed a weird technical flaw with the service--voice mail messages left for me can take a long time to be delivered.

Usually, messages are delivered immediately. At other times, a message has taken 30 minutes to two hours to arrive.

A business visitor told me that it took two hours for a message to arrive in her Verizon Wireless mail box.

Recently, I left messages to two others, and was puzzled at the fact that I had not been called back. Soon found the reason why. One message took over four days to be delivered to the recipient's Verizon Wireless mailbox.

The second was not delivered until after a full week. This call had gone to an AT&T subscriber.

What the hell's going on? I called Verizon, and the tech rep said it had something to do with my phone. She had me do a bunch of useless things--take the battery out, enter a code to update the software. This was silly, as the problem was not and is not in my phone--its with their system, or with whatever system links the various cell phone companies.

I don't know if these things happen outside the US, but they'll keep happening here until companies like Verizon admit they have a problem.

And today? My phone beeped, advising me that there was a voice message. But when I logged in, there was no message. Either they lost a message that was received, or they sent an erroneous message saying that one had been received.

Something's wrong, Verizon.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

We in New Jersey have the same issue of Voice Messages not being received very promptly. A message from last Friday just arrived today and another from over 24 hours ago showed up as well. I think Verizon used to attach a date/time comment to message so you'd know when it was made, but this has been gone for a quite a while. Obviously, they wouldn't want to document how screwed up the message system is.