NY Daily News

High-Speed E-mail Snarled at Verizon
DSL messages arrive late — or not at all

By DAVID ANDELMAN
Daily News Business Writer

Frustration, thy name is Verizon.com.

Tens of thousands of Verizon E-mail customers in New York City who were promised warp-speed DSL Internet connections are saddled with a service that's often so slow, users would do better to walk the message across town.

Even Verizon admits there's a problem.

"It's a rapid, high-growth area. We'll have fits and starts with any new technology or any new service," said Alex Coleman, vice president for operations of Verizon OnLine.

These "fits and starts" are a result of a marketing campaign that produced more customers than Verizon could handle.

Verizon says it aims for 99.9% "uptime," but according to Coleman it barely manages 94% or 95%. With a system serving 1 million E-mail customers, that could mean as many as 60,000 are "down" at any one time, with the biggest concentration in and around New York City.

And that doesn't count Verizon customers whose service is just plain slow.

Joseph Singer of Brighton Beach, who works as a computer specialist in a Wall Street brokerage, said his "E-mail goes out every other day or so." When a friend went to Puerto Rico recently for a vacation, "she sent me an E-mail. I got it two days after she got back," he said.

Take one recent message for a Manhattan subscriber. Promising to "CONSOLIDATE YOUR DEBT OR REFINANCE YOUR HOME!" the E-mail message was like hundreds that cross the screens of Bellatlantic.com customers monthly.

Yet this one took two days and 11 hours to wend its way from Kansas City, Mo., to a Manhattan apartment.

Worse, for much of the past six months, this kind of exasperating experience has been the norm for Verizon customers rather than the exception.

What was supposed to be the fastest and cheapest home Internet connection — the digital subscriber line, or DSL — promised to change the lives of many customers. Gone were the days of brewing a pot of coffee while waiting for a Web-page to pop up with a standard 56K modem. With DSL service, a mere click on a screen would bring up the page in seconds.

But just as often, Verizon DSL service has transformed E-mail into — "snail mail."

That has left New Yorkers at the epicenter of E-mail problems that they share with Verizon customers from Washington to New England.

The root of the difficulty dates more than a year, when Verizon launched an aggressive marketing campaign to sign up new customers for its high-speed DSL service.

Verizon's aim, according to consumer advocates and the company's competitors, was to achieve as close to a monopoly over this unregulated part of the telecom business as was feasible within the confines of telecommunications and anti-monopoly laws.

So Verizon put its efforts into driving several smaller Internet competitors — including Northpoint, Covad and Rhythms — either out of business or onto life support. Simultaneously, it aimed to beat Time Warner Cable's Roadrunner high-speed cable modem service to the customers' doorstep.

Doing Just Fine

"Companies going out of business are companies that don't have sustainable business models," said Verizon spokesman Larry Plumb. "Companies that have sustainable business models are doing just fine."

Still, Verizon has been very aggressive.

"Verizon Online Internet access as dependable as your phone," the company boasted in its marketing pitch. "Fast, reliable Internet access is just a click away."

Well, not exactly.

Still, the campaign was successful. Northpoint filed for bankruptcy in January and last month shut down its entire DSL service. Covad shares have plummeted from $35 a year ago to less than a dollar last week, while Rhythms shares, $26 a year ago, sell for 29 cents.

Meanwhile, Verizon's DSL customer growth took off into the stratosphere, the Daily News found in a three-month inquiry.

By the end of 1999, Verizon had signed up some 87,000 subscribers for its DSL service. In the course of last year, that number exploded to 570,000. By the end of last month it had reached 700,000. On March 31, Verizon was providing E-mail for some 1million customers — a scale and growth rate the old telephone mentality and equipment just couldn't handle.

"The primary focus of their business is providing connectivity," said Charles McColgan, chief technical officer of BigFish Communications, an E-mail technology expert. "They grew their business from the line perspective, and E-mail was of secondary importance to them."

E-mail problems first became apparent to many Verizon subscribers during Christmas. For days at a time, Verizon's E-mail effectively halted. Overtaxed servers clogged with heavy junk E-mail traffic during the holiday rush, delaying messages for hours and even days.

At first, Verizon claimed it was the victim of a "criminal conspiracy," an organized denial-of-service or spam attack by crashers intent on sending millions of coordinated E-mails to flood the company's servers.

"We believe it was malicious," Larry Plumb, a Verizon spokesman, said at the time. By March, however, Verizon had backed off and filed a federal lawsuit in Virginia, instead charging that 100 "John Does" "transmitted millions of unsolicited bulk E-mail messages advertising a variety of goods and services to and through Verizon Online Services Inc. and to its subscribers."

But many Verizon subscribers were fed up. Some were using the E-mail service for their personal use; others were small businesses that relied on Verizon's E-mail for their lifeblood.

"I got so fed up with it, I started my own E-mail program that runs over Verizon's lines," said Andrew Leyden, CEO of Internet startup Penguinradio.com. "I just walked away. I can't have E-mail that disappears for three hours, let alone three days."

Justin Beech, CEO of Manhattan-based Web site dslreports.com, a bulletin-board for DSL complaints, said his business has rocketed as Verizon's E-mail service has deteriorated.

"They always seem to be behind the curve," Beech said. "You'd think having had a year of experience under their belt that they'd be better at anticipating demand rather than being reactive."

Beech and other E-mail technicians contacted by the Daily News said that part of the problem is related to the way Verizon coped with the E-mail glut.

Not the Best Move

They moved most of their E-mail servers for New York to Dallas.Verizon says the goal was to blend the old Bell Atlantic system with the GTE system, linked when the two companies merged last June.

It didn't help.

The problem is that E-mail going from the East Side of Manhattan to the West Side first has to head out to Dallas, taking a circuitous route through 15 or more electronic "hops" or legs each way — and congestion at any one of those points can slow or halt traffic.

"If you're physically closer to the server, you have fewer points of failure or degradation," Beech said. "It always makes sense to locate as close to your customers as possible."

Verizon officials admit there are problems with the system.

"Through consolidation, we wanted to ensure that we provided the best available service," Alex Coleman said. "We haven't gotten there yet, but we will."

Verizon's response so far to all these difficulties — from delays and incompetence to just plain abuse — has mystified customers.

Sarah Vallee, who helps run a Web site for police officers called apbweb.com, kept a diary from the day her Verizon DSL service was first installed in mid-June last year. She's still keeping it. At one point, after talking to a Verizon tech-support representative about a test message that disappeared, she made this entry: "I ask him if there is anything, ANYTHING I can do, and I suggest various things including sacrificing our first-born children. ... He assures me that someone will 'be in touch.' They never call back."

Verizon said complaints about E-mail to their telephone service centers rose from an average of 100 a day early this year to a peak of 2,000 a day in March.

"The best part of it is when you call them up and you say there's something wrong with the E-mail," said author Carl Bernstein, a Verizon DSL customer. "They say, 'Don't feel bad — it's down for all of New York and New England,' as if this is an egalitarian achievement."

-- Anonymous, April 22, 2001

Answers

Old Git,

What did I tell you about Verizon when you were thinking about using their DSL service? We are talking about an *old* entrenched management philosophy here and I can't see that changing any time soon, regardless of the catchy new "non-name" they have chosen to identify themselves with to their consumers. It's like the wooden wagon wheel industry trying to hang on just a little bit longer. DSL sucks, not because there is anything inherently wrong with the technique, but because it is most often being offered/managed by the very same people who don't want to lose any of their previous golden eggs from the golden goose.

-- Anonymous, April 22, 2001

I was waiting for you to post on this, Gordon! And I'm happy to say, "You told me so!" We didn't get Verizon after all, we got Roadrunner and the backup of Sprint dial-up at a special rate of $13.95/month (thanks to our USAA membership). We're happy with RR and the back-up--we would have been very frustrated with Verizon.

-- Anonymous, April 22, 2001