Earlier this morning, approximately 40,000 Verizon union workers went on strike after they weren’t able to reach a new contract agreement with the company.
While Verizon has stated that it has trained non-union employees to cover the jobs and duties of the employees on strike, based on our past experiences with telecom work stoppages, the coverage will not be able to fully support services as they’re intended to.
As a MegaNet customer, you may be wondering how this might impact the services we provide to your home or business. Since we’re an independent telecom provider here in the Northeast, we’re able to provide services to our clients by using the physical networks of various national carriers who connect back to us to deliver local wiring to our customers’ locations. This work stoppage will only affect customers who use physical Verizon wireline services to get Internet access from MegaNet.
This means that any customer who uses DSL, T1, Ethernet over Copper, or our Fiber Internet service that’s based off of FiOS can be affected during the Verizon wireline employee strike. Those services all require local physical Verizon connections back to MegaNet in order for us to supply those customers with Internet access through our network.
During past work stoppages we experienced lengthy delays when our customers had Internet issues related to the physical wiring that provided Internet to their home or office. Tickets we opened with the phone company to test or repair those lines were often not responded to for days at a time (and in a few cases weeks at a time), nor were repairs completed properly in some instances.
Further, new orders that we placed were delayed drastically, including waiting up to 6 months for business class services to finally be installed.
Now, we’re not sure at this point in time how much this current work stoppage will affect Verizon’s support of the physical connections many of our customers need to access the Internet or use phone service. The strike may last a few days, a few weeks, or potentially even a number of months. The longer the strike goes on for, the more repair and installation orders will get backlogged and delayed.
Even with the work stoppage, we will continue to fully support our customers with any concerns or issues they may have with their services with us. If it’s determined that the issue or repair needs to be addressed by Verizon, we’ll do our best to be up front with you about wait times, as well as pursing the issues as far as we can with Verizon’s work coverage.
Customers of ours using Metro Ethernet, Ethernet over Coax, and coax-based cable Internet should not be affected by this work stoppage, as those physical connections back to the MegaNet network are typically handled by other carriers. Because we run a multi-homed backbone network, upstream traffic out of our network should see little to no impact.
If you have any questions at all, please don’t hesitate to let us know. We will continue to support all of our customers as best as we can, and we thank you for your patience during this time period.
