BlogSmall business, Marketing, Promotion and Web Design

The battle rages on – every day when I happen to turn on the TV I see more and more commercials for Optimum TriplePlay, that includes cable TV, internet and phone services. Less then a month ago I’ve seen just as many commercials about Verizon FiOS – again, same old three – TV, phone and internet services in one package.

While the speed issue has been addressed many times, there’s one big problem (availability) and a few small ones (which service plan to choose and why). With Optimum Internet there’s only one level of service and a Boost addition to it, that speeds things up a little and allows you to use ports for HTTP, FTP and SMTP services. Which means you can have yourself a web server and finally can use your web site’s send e-mail capability.

So what’s the story with FiOS? The guy ain’t so good. Any level of consumer-grade internet service will keep your HTTP, FTP and SMTP ports locked up, so even if you are paying $139.99 per month for the top 50/20 plan with one-year contract AND add premium features (in case you need any), you still can’t put your web page up from your home server and you still can’t send an e-mail from your own domain. Sorry, but FiOS doesn’t seem to like geeks, nerds and small business owners (I count myself as all three to some degree).

The resolution? Business-grade packages. The same level of service: 50/20 with one-year commitment and dynamic IP will set you off for $239/month. If you have never heard of DynDNS and want static IP – your monthly bill will be $279/month. However, you can bring it down back to $239 if you slave yourself to another year of commitment. Oh, and did I mention the cumbersome installation process that includes burying the cable to your business’ location, special box installed in electric closet, special wiring, UPS installation and responsibility to replace a battery in it from time to time?

There’s little argument that premium services should cost extra, and the extra $100 for 10x the speed of cable alone is a decent price. However, the real business justifiable reason why one would want to have business FiOS at home-based business is the unlocking of ports for web, FTP and e-mail services, since the speeds are the same for consumer and business packages. So essentially the difference between these packages lies in locking these important services. Which Verizon will happily unlock for you for an extra $100 per month. You can rent another managed server for less than that!

Now, let me brag a little about why would Verizon want to do that. Perhaps the rationale is to force business owners to pay more (bad idea given the current state of economy, they probably won’t). Or maybe Verizon executives think that spammers won’t run their e-mail sending tools from cheaper FiOS (those times are so over, no concious spammer spams from home computer, no matter how fast the connection is). Of course, I don’t know the correct answer. What I do realize, though, is that as a small business owner I will very much bide my time before switching to FiOS now. Here’s why: I am paying $169/month for cable TV and internet service. It is not as fast as FiOS, but

• I can send e-mails to my clients directly from my server/domain name and not use someone else’s SMTP service which I don’t know anything about
• I can use web server occasionally when I need to put together a mock-up real quick. Although with running multiple hosting platforms I rarely do that, the “but I can” argument is still valid.
• I have full access to home FTP and I do backup all accounts daily to home FTP in addition to remote server. So if I need that config file from yesterday’s backup – I don’t have to download the whole gigabyte of the backup from remote backup server.
• I can stream music from home/home server without worrying about someone else having access to my music and me getting spanked by evil RIAA for that.
• I use HTTHost on my home server to dodge direct use of POP/SMTP from remote location, including firewalled job places. Yes, I still use POP instead of IMAP because I like my e-mail to be accessible when I am offline and with 3 years and 4 GB of e-mail history it’s the fastest way.

So, for pretty much all intends and purposes (except for heavy online gaming, which I don’t do) my existing cable internet hookup has more functionality and costs a lot less than FiOS, making it therefore a much better business and personal tool than overpriced FiOS.

Last night I’ve got mail. One of the letters was from a collection agency – they wanted to collect $21.30 on behalf of Verizon phone company. Turns out – I owe these monies to Verizon as a “final bill” – some last minute money extortion policy that they enforce. Apparently, someone at the billing department forgot to send me that one “final bill” in February, when I switched off my land line.

So what’s a poor man to do? I called Verizon. Their local phone number is utilizing the latest and greatest in voice recognition technology. Whenever you call that local number an annoying female voice comes up and starts asking a zillion of questions. Is this the number you’re calling about? Am I right that this isn’t the number? What is the number you’re calling about? Is this the number you’ve said you’re calling about? What is the matter of the call? And so on and so forth…

First problem is that you have to answer every single question in loud clear voice. In almost any environment, except your sound-proof basement there will be a background noise. Sometimes the noise is so significant that system doesn’t recognize a word from what you’re saying. Sometimes you are in a public area or at the office, or in lunch room. Oh, and SPEAKING OUT LOUD YOUR ACCOUNT NUMBER, LAST 4 NUMBERS OF YOUR SOCIAL SECURITY AND FULL CREDIT CARD NUMBER WITH EXPIRATION DATE IS A WRONG AND STUPID IDEA! Hello, do you hear me now?!

I had to hang up and try again. After several attempts I got through to the live person and was told that “there is no person here, at Verizon, who would take your payment over the phone“. Everything has to be done via automated system that I already have been through. The evil, vicious circle was now complete.

My guess is that somehow I will be able to figure out how to get those money to Verizon. Worse case scenario – I’ll go through the collection agency that sent me the bill. What I see is that Verizon, apparently, cutting every possible cost on land line phone business. Obviously, billing department has to have much more thorough training than people who answer the phones first. I expect the service fully fold to total uselessness in about a year or so. Given the rate with which people turn down landlines in preference of IP-based phones and cell phones, I really think landlines would be few and scattered. The tech support would be outsourced to India where poorly trained and badly English-speaking low-wage people will make you want to go back to automated voice-recognition system. Land line is doomed!

After numerous confirmations of scam-like business practices, Network Solution is now looking into implementing a feature that will allow users to “lock” domain for 4 days, instead of doing this for them automatically. Ironically, this feature look just awfully familiar – just like “domain tasting”. With difference being that now anyone can lock the domain without even providing their contact info. Don’t even need to set up various fake registrars to grab and drop domains for tasting, just keep searching for it.

Another bad trick here is that since domain name would appear registered – there is a very good chance squatters may snipe it right the moment it will be released. And it is already very well known what it means. Some of my clients paid pretty large sums for their trademarked name – just to get it faster then through the lawsuit.

Interesting facts:

• In 2000 Network Solutions was purchased by Verisign for $21 billion.
• In 2007 they were purchased for $800 million.

My take? If you have domain names at Network Solutions – move them to someone not so dangerous. GoDaddy, Moniker or NameCheap (we use all three of them) look much better.