All those people who wish that Verizon had access to the iPhone should take heed the experience of Mac users who deal with this company on a daily basis. You see, I’m a Verizon broadband internet customer. And because I own a Mac, they treat me like a second class citizen.
Take, for instance, their recent decision to allow broadband customers to access their WiFi hotspots nationwide. There are some restrictions, but basically, a good portion of their customers are to have access to over 13,000 WiFi hotspots nationwide, free of charge.
That is, of course, unless your laptop happens to be a Mac, or running anything other than Windows. To access these hotspots, Verizon requires you to install a piece of bloatware on your laptop that monitors the connection and authenticates you. And it’s only available – as you can see from the error message above – for Windows users. If you’re a Mac user, you have to “upgrade” to Windows XP or Vista.
Yeah, not bloody likely.
All right, whatever, so it is a Windows world, and 90 percent of the computing population uses Windows, you might yell at the Mac fanboy. But since when did WiFi become platform-specific? You don’t “install” Wifi, you connect to it. I’ve never had to install any special piece of software to use a WiFi hotspot before. And a properly configured one shouldn’t care if I’m on a laptop running Windows, Mac, Linux, Solaris, or even if I somehow hacked up a Commodore 64 with a WiFi chipset. It’s just supposed to work.
By the way: this decision of theirs also shuts out anyone – like me – who happens to have Verizon DSL service at home, and a cell phone with WiFi. None of Verizon’s current cell phones have WiFi capability, but many AT&T phones, including the iPhone and iPod touch, do. So does Sprint’s Palm Pre. Given Verizon’s sour grapes over the iPhone, I kinda wonder if this situation was done on purpose, specifically to shut out such users. Never mind that I pay Verizon every month just like every other DSL or FiOS customer. Clearly if I’m not loyal enough, then I’m second-rate to them.
Windows users should be annoyed by this too. Another piece of poorly-written crap software has to take up space on their hard drives, just so you can get some stinkin’ WiFi? What the hell is Verizon thinking?
Unfortunately, this seems pretty typical of how the company operates. People who sign up for DSL service have to “activate” their accounts by installing and running – you guessed it – a piece of bloated, poorly-written software. Which, by the way, they do have a Mac version this time. Not that it works, though. It crashes, and then you end up having to call tech support and they manually hook you up. Though I take some comfort in hearing that apparently it does this to about half the Windows customers out there, too.
And while we’re on the subject, let’s not forget about their technical support. If you’re a Mac or linux user, and ever find yourself with balky DSL service, do yourself a favor: install Windows on your computer or borrow someone’s Windows laptop, and then call Verizon tech support. And if you can’t do that, well, just lie and say you’re using Windows.
Why? Simple: if you’re not using Windows, they don’t want you on their network. Their tech support menu options are very clear: to them you either run Windows, or “something else.” And if you’re using “something else,” tech support will blame your computer for the problem. Doesn’t matter if lightning fried your modem. It doesn’t even matter if – as what happened in my case – the problem isn’t even related to something in your house or your phone line, but with the DSLAM in the central office up the street. If you’re one of those pesky users of “something else,” then they will always blame that “other” operating system and refuse to troubleshoot further with you.
Given this, it’s no surprise that I’d rather not deal with Verizon for anything, if at all possible. Unfortunately, I, like many other people in the US, have limited options for home broadband and are forced to pick the lesser of two evils. It’s either this, or the cable company. And where I live, the cable company is even worse in terms of reliability.
Given my experience though, I loathe the possibility of Verizon ever getting their grubby paws on sleek, alt-platform devices such as the iPhone. I know well Verizon’s penchant for screwing things up. I’ve been subject to their walled-garden approach to things, how they assume all users are dumb, and how they must have so much control over the user’s access to their network that they don’t trust you to simply plug an industry-standard device in, or sign an industry-standard wireless device onto their networks. Everything must be locked down, buggy special drivers installed, and if your equipment, while well-designed and perfectly functional, doesn’t fit their restrictive little mold and falls into that stigmatic “something else” category, you’re simply shut out and unsupported.
Is this really what people want? It boggles me that so many people use their cell phone service. And while I understand that AT&T has been having problems lately, getting an iPhone on Verizon isn’t going to solve the problem. Make no mistake: any device Verizon touches, they will screw up.
Verizon needs to end the philosophy of extreme network control. They seem happy treating their customers like dumb sheep, but as devices get more advanced, they won’t appeal to upper-crust, advanced users if the experience is locked down and made inefficient. The most recent subscriber-add numbers bear this out. Get the hint!
Verizon and other carriers want so bad to be more than just a dumb pipe. But frankly, the way they treat their customers, a dumb pipe is all I want them to be. They are simply too incompetent to try to be anything else.
