Negotiating with Verizon FiOS

My FiOS contract expires in a few days. Once it expires I’ll be paying a higher rate. I’ve looked at the renewal offerings and they are also at a higher rate, offering me extras that I do not care about. I’ve done a support text chat with a customer rep and she agreed that they are not offering me any way to lower my bill.

I am seriously considering dropping TV and possibly land line coverage. Their online system does not provide an option of dropping my Triple-Play service so I will need to call customer rep next week. Once I drop TV I want them to swap my coax cable with Cat-6 cable, all of the wiring is already installed, just need to change connections in the ONT. Then I can replace my FiOS router with the UniFi setup I desire. I can also easily put an antenna in my attic, I have 2 coax cables there, so using that for network TV should work (I rarely watch network TV).

I have Xfinity’s (Comcast’s) rates in hand, which are much lower than FiOS, though I would rather stick with FiOS. Any suggestions on things to say when calling Verizon next week? In the past customer reps seemed ready to offer better deals over the phone but 2 years ago the offer was’t as sweet.

What always works for me is to threaten to call and threaten cancel. They transfer you to a retention specialist and you can usually negotiate a better bargain with them than the front line agents.

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I had Fios for many years at my home. We recently downsized and moved into an apartment. Fios was not available so I went with the local cable company (Optimum). For full TV (including HBO, showtime etc) a landline and 400 MBS Internet my rates were $180/month. Service was fine for a while and then got worse and worse till my 400 MBS service disappeared completely. Service calls to Optimum were answered with “Shut down your router and restart”. That would work for a while and then it too got worse. The answer was to “shut down for 5 minutes”. Then “shut down for 10 minutes”. In th end I was running all my zoom meetings and classes on Wireless minutes.

Fios had become available in the building but when I called they wanted $250/month! I yelled and screamed and implored, but that was the price for the services I wanted.

In the end I decided that $250 for service was better than $180 for no service. (BTW -at the end, I was routinely getting dropped on land line calls and the TV reception was…adequate).

I got FIOS installed and not only was the installation more professional the service has been excellent.

My belief is that Optimum oversold the segment and with the pandemic going on everyone was home and using up the bandwidth.

I do not regret making the change. I just groan a little every month when the bill comes in.

Sam

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In addition to the excellent suggestions above, It’s a good idea to have documentation about features and prices of the FIOS and Comcast off the rack packages sitting in front of you. But before you make the call, consider what bargaining chips would work for you…what might want them to add on to a package, like faster speed, more storage, extra channels or whatever, in addition to a better price.

Start the conversation off by focusing on a cable package that’s cheaper or better, or preferably both. Be sure to emphasize that you have been a long time Verizon customer that pays your bills on time and doesn’t call frequently to complain. Be prepared with numbers and extra features…I’m paying you guys $abcd.yz per year and Xfinity will be $efgh.yz with this extra stuff thrown in. If Verizon is offering a sign up deal, be sure to bring it up too.

And don’t let the rep think you are being wishy-washy about switching, they are trained to look for signals that you are serious about making a move right away. If you don’t like any of the offers, let him know that your next call will be to the cable company to sign up, weather it is true or not. You want to be the cool, calm, factual, concise Mac guy in the old commercials, not the blabby PC guy that will never switch to something better.

This reminds me of something else a potential switcher should consider. If you do change services, you’ll be inundated with special offers from your prior provider to switch back.

I’m also an apartment dweller, and when cable service became available in my area, the building signed an exclusive deal with Time Warner. When the contract expired, the building allowed Verizon FIOS in as well. Other buildings in the area made the same deals. We decided we would wait and see before switching, and everyone else was so unhappy that just about all of them switched back.

Thanks for the advice. I’ve kept the latest Xfinity flyer so I have my pricing in hand. FiOS seems to be offering 200Mbps for the same price as 75Mbps (my current speed) but that would require replacing the ONT for $150 (working from memory). I am thinking of sticking with 75Mbps until I am ready to supply my own router (I am waiting for Wifi6 with UniFi Dream Machine) and then switch to Cat 5e/6 and my own router. I currently own my own router with FiOS but it maxes out at 75Mbps. Yes, my ONT is well over 10 years old.

Getting ready to call Verizon. Checked with Xfinity. For consumers in my are the most they can offer for upload speed is 35Mbps with the 300Mbps download speed package. Which is less upload than I have now and I am concerned will slow me down part of the month. Business offerings are also asymmetrical unless I go with their business ethernet service. I assume costly since they don’t post that pricing on the web and might be building specific. But Verizon doesn’t have to know that I want to stay with them for the faster upload speed. Getting to call now.

Vaya con Dios, and let us know how it went.

It is going very good. The best deal was to stick with Internet and phone which drops the bill a lot and gives me money for streaming. No contract (keeping contract was more expensive). The person on the phone was very nice. And he knew the extra costs of Comcast and upload speed limits.

The advantage of no contract is that I can change things whenever I want. Once I pick an Internet phone service that will block all calls except those I whitelist (I have it in my notes somewhere) I will switch to that and forward all whitelisted calls to my cell. That is step 2.

I will upgrade my internal network once UniFi offers a Dream Machine and access points at Wifi 6 and then have Verizon tech come to switch my ONT wiring from coax to Cat 6 (all wiring is in place) and replace the ONT to support faster speeds and upgrade my Internet speed to 200Mbps up/down for the same price I am currently paying.

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And now I have money for streaming services.

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For everyone’s future reference, I have a friend who, when his cable/internet bill goes up too much, just closes his account and signs up for a new account in his wife’s name, since new customer accounts usually get better deals. In a few years when he switches back to his name as needed.

Now, it helps that she has a different last name, and the logistical hassles may not be worth it for everyone. But it’s worth storing the idea away as a last resort option.

Peter

We have had FIOS for many years and like many of our neighbors left Comcast as soon as FIOS was available. When we went to FIOS we dropped “cable” television altogether and never looked back. We put and OTA antenna up and used the cable system in the house to distribute the OTA signal. We use that for morning news and local sports teams that are broadcast. We got a free year of Apple TV with a new phone recently and share a Netflix account with other family members.
Our big discovery was Roku. We’ve had a Roku plug-in in a kitchen TV quite a few years, switching to it for music as needed. Roku is a one-time buy starting at around $30. We later upgraded another house TV to a Roku TV, which has an expanded version of the user interface we had learned on the kitchen setup. It’s 55". We can access OTA, use a DVD, and acess all of the major streaming services (some require subscriptions) but really like it.