Open Letter to John A. Wimsatt, Senior Vice President, Verizon Broadband Marketing

John A. Wimsatt
Senior Vice President, Broadband Marketing
One Verizon Way
Basking Ridge, NJ 07920

10/30/2009

Dear Mr. Wimsatt,

Ever since I subscribed to Verizon FIOS services in 2007, your organization has gone the extra mile to sell me Verizon FIOS services. At first, marketers swarmed across my neighborhood, knocking on my door, and giving me their sales pitch.
More recently, you have resorted to junk mail. I get about two to three mailings every week, some printed on nice heavy card stock, others are letters in window-envelopes, both are equally useless and unwanted.
All of this must cost your company a lot of money. The cost of printing and mailing such nice material is not insignificant, I know from my own experience.

I believe that you would be better served by investing your revenues into other areas. For example, I experienced two full service outages last month that each lasted more than 24 hours. I am not complaining that I did not receive credit for the time I was unable to use your service.
These outages, however, would have been preventable had some of the mass marketing funds been diverted into technology.

With these facts in mind, I am wondering what this upcoming rate increase is all about (to $52.99 for Internet service, plus the inevitable plethora of fees that will bring it to $60). Will you spend the additional revenues on sending me more marketing materials? Or will you improve your infrastructure? I certainly hope for the latter.

There is a missed opportunity here, though, that I would like to point out to you. I estimate that about 20% of the money that I pay you each month for my FIOS broadband service is spent on marketing efforts that directly or indirectly target my household. Why don’t you stop spamming me, and we split the proceeds? I get a reversal of the rate increase; you can invest an additional $5 every month into your technology infrastructure? Isn’t this a win-win proposal?
The number of FIOS subscribers must be approaching 3 million by now, or may even have surpassed this mark already (even if the current economic conditions slowed down your growth rate compared to 2008). If you apply my proposal to all of them, this adds up to real money. Think about it, and let me know.

Sincerely,

Christian Donner

P.S.: In times like these, it is good to know that Comcast is still around, as an option, just in case. Since Cable easily matches the bandwidth that I get with FIOS, but is a lot more reliable (I have been a Comcast subscriber for many years and can certify that I never had a 24 hour outage with them), it seems to be an attractive option.