A Verizon FiOS customer was suspicious when a sales associate told him he needed to upgrade his plan to provide a smoother streaming video experience.
While trying to renew his Internet service, Dan Rayburn, was told that his 50 Mbps plan was not powerful enough to provide the smoothest Netflix experience and that he should upgrade to a 75 Mbps plan.
Rayburn, a streaming video analyst, called foul.
According to Netflix’s own speed index, the average streaming speed on FiOS for the over-the-top service tops out at 3.5 Mbps. When Rayburn pointed this out to the sales reps, they argued the extra bandwidth is needed to keep up with the demand from multiple users in a household.
Rayburn even went as far as to test the bandwidth demands, streaming the season premiere of Game of Thrones on ten separate devices using HBO Now and Sling TV.
“All combined, I consumed just under 29Mbps of my 50Mbps connection and all ten streams had perfect quality, he explains. “HBO Now’s bitrate maxes out at 4Mbps and some of the streams I had going were to mobile devices. Amongst the ten streams, they averaged 2.9Mbps per second.”
He tweeted the results:
Rayburn believes the misleading salesmanship is not just an honest mistake by one sales associate. He says he received the sales pitch from three separate Verizon reps.
“Verizon is simply using the average consumers lack of knowledge of bitrates and streaming technology to scare them into thinking they need a higher tiered package than they really do,” he said on a streaming media blog.
The major carriers says they do not instruct their sales reps to up-sell the faster Internet speeds in this way. They say they have reviewed “tens of thousands of calls to make sure that’s not the case, and it’s not.”
“We take customer feedback like Mr. Rayburn’s and use it to help our employees have ever-more effective conversations with customers,” Verizon adds. “Our employees’ goal is always to deliver the best experience for customers—100 percent of the time. We take customer feedback, and employee feedback, as well as data to continually improve the tools employees have to better serve our customers.”
