I recently switched to FIOS ... and just got this email.

Don't worry about surprise repair expenses for your telephone wiring and jacks inside your home. The Verizon Inside Wire Maintenance plan covers diagnosis and repair of the inside telephone wiring and jacks that provide your Verizon dial tone service, for just $7.99 per month.

Our 99.9% network reliability covers your phone service. Extend that peace of mind all the way to the inside your home with our worry-free Wire Maintenance plan.

For less than 27 cents a day, there will be one less thing to worry about, and it's a simple call or click away!

Can you even imagine in this day and age someone would buy this??

Why wouldn't people buy this? Sure for us it seems like a waste of money but think about the majority of people who have no idea or clue how any of this works. All it takes is 1 inside trouble and a bill for 150 bucks for a truck roll to see that this is actually not a bad deal for lots of folks.

thats 95$ a year, most people i know have not see a phone tech for years, and i mean laymen who wouldnt know tip from ring. thats 7.99 you could put in a high interest savings account and dip in when there is a problem

Could you recommend a high interest savings account? I haven’t seen one in several years!

$95 x 10 years = $950. Even if you had a couple of trouble repairs in 10 years it would only be $200 or $400. Most homes don't have 1 repair in 10 years. this is a huge money maker for Verizon.

Makes me proud to be a Verizon stockholder ;-)


Sam

The problem that I see is that most of the Verizon technicians around here lack true troubleshooting skills. We had one who actually stopped by here yesterday to tell me that he's in over his head and wanted to know if we could do the repair for the customer. In his defense, he was working with a ComKey 416 system and he did do the right thing by knowing his limitations. He took the initiative to take our card, to call the customer and to arrange for us to go out there.

While I admire this guy for the extra effort that he made, the customer still has an inside wiring issue that they will end up paying us to fix. The inside wiring maintenance fee that they've been paying for on all of their lines for years won't likely be reimbursed.

They probably looked at it, and their eyes glazed over...

Were looking at this from an insider point of view though. Yes it makes them money. That's the point of selling. How many times have we seen clients hit with truck roll charges because they trouble was inside? For someone who doesn't know anything this is like buying a maintenance agreement on an appliance. These plans are mostly aimed at residential not commercial and theres not going to be too many phone systems or very hard to troubleshoot inside wiring situations as opposed to commercial.

i just find its pricey, its like my grandfather who was paying rent on a 500 set until he died in 2002, it was costing him 8$ a month. those phones could be had at the time at woolco for 12$.

I personally am not looking at this charge from an insider point of view. Im looking at it from a consumers view. Inside wiring when not touched (like what most people do) is fairly reliable. As a child i remember bell only comming out to our house on the rare occaision my mom dribbled water in a jack after stripping wallpaper, and that was VERY rare. This to me is some accountant saying "lets think of a service where we wont have to do much and take in a lot more" its similar to here in quebec they mandated drivers ed and made an 800$ ceiling on the price of the course, so some driving schools are chargning 300$ for a text book. In business they are always looking for a new way to find revenue streams.

That's pricy. Here in Manitoba, Manitoba Telecom (MTS) is only charging $2.50 a month for their inside residential wire watch. There is a 24 month minimum plan subscription.

Instead of complaining, take advantage of the scare tactics that VZ has already used to get people fretting, and then step in and offer to sell the same service for 50% off. What works for them can work for you.

my grandmothers house had two issues last year..she had IWM (i dont know why) first time..it was an old bridle pair that was coraded. "we can fix this the wiring has been tampered with"...ohh really....took my 10min to replace. Second time...and I will say the guy tried...static. NOw grandma lives in an old house so all the apartment jacks terminate to a splice point under one of the windows. instead of opening up the splice point to isolate he just starts swapping pairs..after two hours..could not fix it and was going to come back out. Anyway I opened up the splice point, clean dt. connected jack 1...clean..2 clean...3 static...traced out the line and found a bad splice, must have been done years ago by another vrz tech. any way replace the whole run. static cleared..total time spent 1 hour...ohh and 10 min to reqire alarm jack the vrz tech screwed up.

Please tell me where that high interest account is. My retirement funds are taking a beating.

Ed,

Would a wire maintenence plan actually cover a phone system of any kind?

Not doubting your knowledge, just trying to understand since I've never heard of anything like that in my neck of the woods...

Normally no...but I have seen techs try and trace an extension back to a system block. they are not supposed to, but it gets done

I'm not sure how you interpreted this as a complaint ....... it was just info i received that i thought was relevant to our industry and i wanted to share it.

Nothing new up here with that. Bell's been doing that for years. Last I knew it was $5/month for residential and forget what it was for business as I've only heard about that a couple of times.

For the residential, it usually got added to your account by a slick talking clerk when dealing with Bell and always gets cancelled after the client talks to me. (I don't offer residential MA's).

For business, probably the same, but it does NOT cover systems, just the inside wiring.

Of course, Bell is more than happy to offer a MA for the system, but I can undercut them any day if I get the chance!

Oh, I'm positive that inside wiring maintenance does not cover system issues. That would be financial suicide for Verizon. In this case, the VZ technician went above and beyond the normal scope of what is covered. He was doing what he thought was the right thing by going the extra few steps for the customer.

In this case, there is a good chance that this guy was still in diapers when the system was installed. I admire his effort though.

I'm sure that inside wiring maintenance was sold to this customer without Verizon having any idea that the customer has a system in place.

we have the banks fighting up here in canadia, mine is paying 1.4% (yeah pretty low but the regular savings accounts are even lower, heck put it in a TFSA that way any interest earned is tax free (another canadian thing))

dave bell has a service plan up here for systems that is quite the racket, after reading through what it covers i told my church to drop it (it was a ridicoulously high monthly amount). Basically every phone in the place would have to break once a year to have it pay off. I tend to shy away from service contracts for my own stuff (except my furnace, when im shivering at 4am i like to call the oil company and know a tech will be there in 1 hr).

Im more surprised that they only guarantee a 99.9% uptime.

They call it Line Guard here in SW. Fla. It is a cash-cow for the Telco's. I have seen the remedy for an IW issue. Blue cat 5 cable stapled down the baseboard, over the the doorway. Our Century Link tech's are forbidden to do attic work. I advise all of my clients to dump this service..