Verizon vs. Akamai
I had my first Verizon tech support experience yesterday. And it went roughly as expected.
Akamai sites (including sites like Apple and Dell, as well as Akamai's own site) are broken for me right now, and have been since Friday. As far as I can tell, Verizon's network group doesn't know this is happening. This is despite two hours (!) of time spent on the phone yesterday trying to convince them of this fact.
Verizon loses big points here. The low level tech support guy and his manager simply didn't believe me that the IP address I was seeing for, say, "i.dell.com" was different from the one they were getting at their call center. Attempts to explain that this was because that was how Akamai's business works fell on deaf ears. Finally, I got them to escalate the problem by giving them a numerical IP address for a server and pointing out that it was on a Verizon network (I had to show them how to use the whois page at networksolutions.com...). Even then, they insisted that I boot up a windows machine so they could use their Citrix remote desktop tool to verify it for their own eyes.
Finally I got to talk to a guy in "DNS Support" (this doesn't look like a DNS issue to me, more likely a routing bug, but whatever...) who, although he still didn't know what Akamai was or how to spell it, verified the issue and promised to get back to me. He hasn't yet.
Deep inside, though, I always knew that Verizon's support was going to be awful. They're a phone company, and they always will be. So there's nothing surprising here: I picked FiOS knowing that I'd have to deal with this sort of thing.
But there's another lesson, and it's not for Verizon customers but for ones of Akamai: you need to realize when you buy this sort of content delivery network service that not only are you buying accelerated content delivery, you are buying a new failure mode. And one that has nothing to do with you or Akamai, but with the ISP at the customer's end. Does that sound like a good bargain?