3. Verizon Wireless Frustrates The Law

From Robert

I work for a large Sheriff's Office in the Southeast with a fleet of around 600 patrol vehicles. That makes for about 100-200 patrol cruisers on the road at all times, depending on the time of day. As a part of tech support for the agency, I spend a lot of time working on the laptops we have in the cars. For connectivity, we use Verizon Wireless Broadband Access PCMCIA AirCards from Sierra Wireless. For those not familiar with them, they work like a cell phone, but provide good speed for such a device, usually 300kps-500kps.

One night, I stupidly went to the movie theater, while I was the primary tech for callout (hey, it was Star Wars EPIII). My phone started buzzing. Sure enough, all the deputy's laptops couldn't connect to the office and sign in to the dispatch system. I headed to my car, fired up my laptop and connected the Verizon AirCard. However, my VPN wouldn't connect. I then noticed that I couldn't surf the web, or access anything over the AirCard despite the fact that it was connected.

So after driving to the office, I checked all our systems, and verified the problem was with Verizon Wireless. I headed to my desk to give Verizon a call. We had seen problems like this before. It usually resulted from a Verizon router going down somewhere in the state. I called Verizon and got level 1 support pretty quickly. After the usual name, address, and account number verification info, I described the problem, purposely repeating the fact that I had about 100 AirCards that weren't working. The Verizon tech support person seemed to ignore that key piece of troubleshooting info and we started on the usual gauntlet of level one troubleshooting.

I decided I'd play along, despite the fact that it was midnight and I was tired. I rebooted my laptop, reactivated the AirCard, unplugged it, plugged it back it, reinstalled the software, and tried a different laptop and AirCard. He then had me check my VPN servers, which where still running just fine, since I could connect to them from a cable modem.

After 45 minutes of trying things that didn't work, he crossed the line. "Have you tried a system restore on the laptop?" I was overtired and sick of the runaround. I made it very clear to him that I had 100 laptops running right now with 100 different AirCards in 100 different cars and none of them worked. There was no way on earth I was going to run a system restore on every one. After that friendly, stern talk, there was a moment of silence, followed by questions from a very confused Verizon Wireless tech. Soon after we were able to both agree that the problem was not with my systems. He insisted that his systems showed no outages for the AirCard data systems, so I was getting escalated.

Just as everything was looking up, his computer crashed and he lost all my info. He said he'd call me back in 10 minutes after he got the system back up and re-entered my info. Forty-five minutes later he called back. We spent another half hour on the phone as I gave him more info for his many forms. Finally, I was put on hold to be escalated. Another half-hour and someone picked up. It was past 3am, and I got the answer I expected all night. The tech verified my location, and then told me a router had gone down, but they didn't have an ETA for a fix. I gave him my cell number so he could call me when it came back up. I was hungry, so I went to IHOP...at least that part of the night went well. The French toast was quite good.

Later, we talked to our Verizon Wireless sales rep who quickly took steps to assure that this wouldn't happen again. We now get alerts when switches or routers fail and we are able to get answers faster without going through tech level 1 support.