The saga with Verizon is that they are the current owners of UUNet. The relationship between UUNet and Verizon is best explained with a fairy tale parable: translated into the language of fairy tales, UUNet is a beautiful princess and Verizon is an evil monster holding her hostage. The UUNet backbone is awesome (the world's coolest in the highly subjective opinion of this hacker), the technical support/maintenance department is outstanding, but the evil sales department blocks the way in. If you already have an active UUNet circuit at a steady physical location, it'll work like a charm forever and if you ever have any problems on the technical side of things, the maintenance department will take good care of you. But woe on you if you need it moved to another physical location, if you need another circuit or if you need anything else that has to go through the business side of things.
Harhan has been a UUNet customer since 2002, back when they were WorldCom.
We have started with Dial Office (a very cool dedicated-over-dial service
they no longer offer), then switched to SDSL in late 2004 / early 2005
— WorldCom had become MCI by then and started showing the first signs of
deterioration: the SDSL service offering had changed from Enterprise DSL
to DSL Office
.
The MCI sales representative who had originally got us on SDSL was the absolute best ever, and when evil Verizon laid him off in 2006, it was the end of an era. They still had the Rhythms network with Copper Mountain DSLAMs at the time, and this was when I was frantically trying to bring Larscom's CupreDSU back from the ashes. David (our original sales rep) and the other people he had brought on to work on our case were absolutely wonderful. I was put on the line with very knowledgeable engineers who had explained their network configuration very well, and they were willing to go totally out of their way to accommodate our eccentric needs. David was willing to officially waive the requirement of using their CPE, and the engineers he had put me in touch with were willing to accommodate my open source router/DSU with any special configuration that might have been needed either on the DSLAM or on the Redback router which connects the DSL network to the backbone. I felt on top of the world with these wonderful people, but what had put an end to the excitement was the impossibility of obtaining a CupreDSU, something that obviously couldn't be blamed on MCI. We had then settled for the bridging workaround.
Since then life circumstances have put us through several physical relocations; David was there to carry us through the first of those, but not for the subsequent ones. Our first relocation had moved us from a bridged circuit provisioned via Rhythms/CM to a routed one provisioned via Covad; at about the same time MCI had become Verizon and the evildoers had decommissioned the Rhythms network, hence Covad had become the only available option regardless of location.
When our guardian angel David got laid off, life had become hell whenever some action was needed from Verizon's business office. Forget about closed source CPE routers, we had a much greater problem on our hands: the new Verizon sales reps were simply refusing to provide us service altogether at the locations we needed! Here is just a sampling of the jaw-dropping BS that the Verizon shitheads have thrown at us:
Before we had cracked the Nokia SDSL flavor, the beast seemed very scary and we were uncertain whether it could ever be conquered, and just at that time we had a need for a new UUNet circuit. To err on the side of caution, we wanted to get IDSL instead of SDSL. But lo and behold, the assholes at Verizon had refused to sell it to us! They had quoted an ungodly assinine policy that they served IDSL only in those locations where SDSL was unavailable and that they required SDSL wherever it was available.
At one unfortunate physical location the fuckheads had refused to provide the service altogether for absolutely no good reason at all. They would initiate the order, send it to Covad, Covad would order an unbundled loop from the ILEC, the ILEC would deliver the loop and report its length to Covad. Based on that number alone and without even trying it, the fuckheads would declare that it would never work, that the service was unavailable, and they would unilaterally cancel the order. In reality the circuit worked like a charm, but the Verizon fuckheads would not allow me, the Customer to accept the service as being good enough for me, and they were completely deaf to my pleas to stop the order cancellation.
In my last round of interaction with Verizon's sales department in April of 2008 the sales rep who was dealt out to me (Donavan Cook) kept claiming that SDSL service was unavailable in general. (Mind you, this was not the location where we got turned down for loop length, this place is very close to the CO and Covad SDSL service is perfectly available there.) I don't know whether this guy was plain incompetent, if Verizon simply doesn't want to sell SDSL any more to anyone anywhere (perhaps they are killing it like they had killed Dial Office and ISDN Office earlier) or if the deal between Verizon and Covad has dried up and if they are not serving via Covad any more. I don't know the correct answer to the previous question because the assholes had refused to give it to me. Our solution (workaround) was to get the service at this address by doing a move/reterm of an existing SDSL circuit to that location; that operation was perfectly successful because it could be done through the customer service department instead of sales. (But that certainly puts a strain of doubt on that asshole's adamant statement that the service was absolutely totally unavailable at that address!)
Our current situation with Verizon is as follows: we've been able to rent an office suite in a location that's far from ideal, but is at least workable, and by a combination of miracles we have got an active UUNet circuit (Covad SDSL) at that address. What we are going to do now is relocate our facilities and operations to that location, i.e., instead of bringing a line to where we want to be, bring ourselves to where the line is. It's doing business backwards, but it's the only way for me to retain the last bit of my sanity after all this dealing with Verizon and to bring some long-overdue closure to this saga of torture.
If you are considering getting new service from Verizon Business (signing up as a new customer), I think I've told you just enough to dissuade you from that idea. Really not a good plan. But if you are an existing customer and are simply looking to replace the closed source proprietary router you were given with an open source solution, that's easy. The Verizonheads will never know or care.
I don't know if Verizon/UUNet has any active customers still remaining on any of their old Rhythms CM DSLAMs or if they have disconnected the last one; if you are a still-standing owner of an active Rhythms line, please write to us. The rest of active UUNet SDSL customers should be just like us, served via Covad. The Hack-o-Rocket works wonders on routed UUNet/Covad lines.