Verizon’s given me a lot of pains lately. There aren’t a whole lot of options around here in the mountains for cell phone providers, pretty much everyone has Verizon. Which has me on two angles: reception, and that dang Verizon IN. I can get way better reception almost anywhere with Verizon because they own all the towers in the area. And since everyone actually has Verizon, most of my calls are free.
The last few phones I’ve had have been neat, but lacking in features from the original factory specs. This is because Verizon has programmers that write their own firmware for the phone, making sure that if you get the phone from Verizon, and you want it to rontinue working on Verizon, you’re going to have to shell out for all those nifty features via their Get It Now and VZNavigator softwares, when some of that functionality should be built into the phone.
Notably, the last few cell phones I’ve had from Verizon were able to do DUN (dial-up networking) over a USB cable connected to my laptop. They recently told me over the phone that you had to add a $60 / month data plan to your current plan if you wanted to do tethered networking.
After checking a few message boards *cough* http://www.howardforums.com/ *cough* I was able to find the correct directions for getting on. Unfortunately, in my area the EVDO service pretty much doesn’t exist, which limited my connection to somewhere around 14.4 kbps (imagine early, prehistoric dial-up speed) which essentially renders the internet useless for most of my applications. Thankfully our cable service provider will be installing our cable internet on Friday.
Speaking of cable – the whole reason we are having to go back to cable for our internet is that I had a web order and a confirmation number and everything, and we were supposedly waiting on DSL to arrive in the mail, and Verizon never notified us that the computer cancelled our order because the circuitry in our area was overloaded. The best part is, I found this out after I had already gotten our cable disconnected and satellite installed.
So Verizon, be ware, you are officially on the Raging Tech’s poop-list, somewhere betwixt Mediacom and the current state of the United States government and electoral colleges.