It took Verizon seven months to fix Internet outage in NYC building

East 127th Street in Harlem. (credit: Vernon Williams)

Last summer, a manhole fire knocked out Verizon telephone and DSL Internet service at an apartment building on East 127^th Street in Harlem.

Verizon didn’t restore service to the building until Friday of last week, about seven months after the outage began. Needless to say, the owner of the building is angry at Verizon—and also can’t figure out why his building doesn’t yet have Verizon’s fiber-based FiOS service. Verizon made an agreement with New York City to bring FiOS to every household in the city by June 2014, but many buildings still don’t have access.

“You can’t turn around without seeing a pitch for Verizon FiOS,” the building owner, Vernon Williams, told Ars. “It sounds great.” Williams figures that his neighborhood is a lower priority for Verizon because there are fewer customers per block than areas with high-rise buildings.

Read 18 remaining paragraphs | Comments