When I signed up for Verizon FiOS a few months ago, I got the 15/2mbps service. I was told that Verizon was going to be increasing all its d/u speeds in retaliation to Comcast’s announcement of upcoming 60mbps service in select areas. Rumor had it that my 15/2 service would become 20/5 automatically.

The automatic bump never happened. I called Verizon approximately 8 times to inquire about it and every person I talked to had a different understanding of it, though truthfully, several FiOS service reps were totally unaware.

I called again today and immediately selected the option to talk to someone in billing. I got a very nice girl on the phone who was willing to listen to my gripe. A first time experience for me dealing with Verizon – she knew exactly what I was talking about. Oh My Frikin Gawd! A FiOS employee in the know! Wow! She checked my account, confirmed that the 20/5 option was indeed available to me and put the change request in. For free, by the way.

Now that was pretty awesome. It got even better when she told me when to expect the upgrade to take place. “Now,” she said. My reply was less eloquent – something like “Haruh?!”

Lo and behold, I popped over to speedtest.net and ran a quick test. I got a near perfect score. Here’s the result:

So if you have FiOS, you may be eligible for a free upgrade. Give them a call. Give the billing dept a call. The support guys are serving up a pretty dismal 10% success rate at solving problems.

P.S. It looks like I can upgrade to 20/20mbps for an extra $10 per month. I might just do that!