Never pick a fight with a database

March 22, 2016 7:35 AM

Have you succeeded in getting internet service at an address which doesn't exist in the provider's database?

We will be moving into a rental house for two months while we are between more long-term housing. We attempted to schedule the installation of Internet service, but have been stymied because this street address does not exist in the systems of any of the providers we have called, apparently due to unconventional street naming.¹

To be clear, this is not a case of the providers not offering service in this area. Addresses a stone's throw away in each direction on cross streets are shown as being available for hookup. It's only addresses on this particular street that are problematic, due to errors in the providers' databases.

My girlfriend and I have collectively spent hours on the phone trying to convince the two local broadband providers (Verizon and Time Warner) that this address exists but to no avail. Broadband is a necessity for me as I work remotely and am expected to spend most of my workday on video calls (so a cellular hotspot is very unlikely to be a satisfactory solution for two months). Satellite providers seem to require contracts for terms much longer than two months.

Have you successfully navigated a similar situation with a big ISP? Is there some secret corporate department of geographical accuracy I can call? This seems like a silly thing but I am panicking about not being able to work and potentially losing my job.

1. The street address looks like "42 Foo St. Neighborhood Name," where "Foo St. Neighborhood Name" is the legal street name. There is also a valid, but different, address "42 Foo St." in the same city. Addresses north of a certain point are on Foo St.; south of a certain point they are on Foo St. Neighborhood Name. They could have called them North Foo St. and South Foo St. and saved me lots of trouble, but they didn't. The street address comes up in the correct place and distinct from 42 Foo St. in Google Maps, and also in the USPS database, according to its ZIP code lookup tool, but ISPs seem to use some other, inferior, geolocating data source.

posted by enn to Technology (13 answers total)

I had this exact problem (if you're in "Washington Heights" in Newburgh, I'm sorry that we didn't get all of them in the database), and I just kept escalating the issue. I think the third-line "manager" finally agreed to check the address on Mapquest, then got the database updated.
posted by Etrigan at 7:41 AM on March 22, 2016 [2 favorites]

Was there service at that address previously? If there was and you know the name of the previous tenant, ask the cable company to search for them and their address. This is what a friend of mine did in these circumstances.
posted by AugustWest at 7:45 AM on March 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

You might join NextDoor for the neighborhood and ask this question. Or go the old fashioned route and start knocking.on doors to see what the neighbors have done. Might even take less time than hanging on hold for hours.
posted by vignettist at 7:50 AM on March 22, 2016

Response by poster: Etrigan, wow, that is exactly where we are moving! It is really encouraging to learn that someone else has solved this problem—that motivates me to keep trying.

I'm not sure if there has ever been service there before. The owner just bought the house in January and it was vacant at that time.

I will definitely ask the neighbors once we're there, but we're hundreds of miles away right now and I'd hoped to have an installation scheduled before we moved.
posted by enn at 7:55 AM on March 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

When I worked at the phone company, I'd ask if they knew the previous phone number and I could look that up and see how it was listed in our database.

If you know the name of the previous renter, AND if they had cable/internet that might be helpful. Ask your landlord for any info, and see if you can use it to search on customer name. Pray it was something really unique and not John Smith.

I personally would dread calls from folks wanting to put a phone in, in the Keys. It was called a Descriptive Address and it looked like

MM112, 2nd House, W of Aamoco

Mile Marker 112, 2nd house west of the Aamoco gas station. Cripes!
posted by Ruthless Bunny at 9:40 AM on March 22, 2016

Oh boy, I had a similar problem except with Comcast. It took multiple weeks of calling to get my cable installed. What must've been like the twentieth person I talked to magically found my apartment in the database after multiple escalations, broken promises to call back or send out a tech, etc...

Did you try looking up your ZIP+4 and giving it to them? It might help.
posted by neckro23 at 9:46 AM on March 22, 2016

I had this exact problem recently and, like neckro23, it was with Comcast. Comcast's website insisted service was not available in my area and the customer service rep I reached by phone kept telling me my address didn't exist and even if it did, it wasn't in their service area. I knew Comcast was being used in my area because whenever I scanned for open wifi, there were dozens of xfinity hotpots within my range.

After wasting ten minutes trying to convince the rep that my address actually existed, I instead decided to give him the address of the nearest cross street, which belonged to the leasing office of the complex I'm in, and was already in Comcast's database because that street was a year older. (I verified that by checking online.) He was then able to schedule my install appointment. On the install date, the technician (predictably) called my cell because he couldn't find my street using Comcast's GPS; I stepped outside my door and waved him over ... from sixty feet away.

Anyway, joke was on me because he wasn't able to complete the install after all. Turns out the apartment complex I'm in has an exclusive deal with Comcast's competitor, so they wouldn't give him the master key he needed to hook me up. Reluctantly, I cancelled everything. The CSR said I wouldn't be charged. The next month, I received a bill from Comcast at the address that they said didn't exist, for the services I wasn't receiving. Comcastic!

So, my advice: find the nearest street in your area that Comcast services and give them an address there. Schedule your appointment. On the appointment day, wait for the call from the install tech saying he's lost/can't find your street, then give him directions from there. Don't bother with arguing with them for hours over the phone. It's a waste of breath.
posted by LuckySeven~ at 10:46 AM on March 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

I don't know if your city has a franchise agreement with the ISP to provide service to all residents within an area, but that could something to check. Sometimes the agreement is on the city's website, but you could call the city administrators for more information about about the area served or any service boundaries within the agreement.
posted by bCat at 10:53 AM on March 22, 2016

I had a similar (but not exactly the same) experience with Comcast installation at our new house a few years back. The real kicker was that they had no problem finding all of our neighbors in their database and the previous owners of the house had Comcast service. Despite these things that should have made it obvious to anyone that it was just a glitch in their database, the first level customer service reps still refused to give me service. Going up the chain just one level (which the lower-level reps were initially not willing to do) was enough to get someone who could look at the problem and realize that it was just a small glitch on their end.

So, yes. Try to talk to the people one or two levels up. The first tier representatives aren't paid enough to think; they can just look at a computer screen and tell you what the computer says. I'm not saying that I haven't had some excellent first-tier customer service reps, but they're the exception rather than the rule.

The other idea I have is something I think I read on one of those "one crazy trick" Facebook clickbait posts. I was at the end of my rope with our electric company (complications on getting service hooked up again after a fire at our house), so I decided to try it. I approached the conversation as if I were really having a really hard time and this customer service rep was going to be my savior. I used phrases like, "I'm having trouble with something and I'm really hoping you can help me." Everything they tried received effusive praise ("Thank you so much for looking this up. It's so helpful to me.") and I really did everything I could to make it seem as if it were "me and her" against the system. I was highly skeptic of this; I was sure she'd see through my fake desperation and over-effusive praise. But it totally worked. After repeatedly running into a wall with the three previous reps I spoke to, she took the extra step of figuring out the form I needed and emailing it to me. I always try to be courteous to people I talk to on the phone, but the thing I was missing was also being "helpless" and "in a really tough spot."
posted by Betelgeuse at 11:30 AM on March 22, 2016

I work at an ISP and come across addressing issues like this quite frequently. A common one is that due to subdivision of a block of land or renovation of a building, the street or postal addresses no longer match up with the addresses in telecommunications databases. Usually when I am having a hard hooking up a service at someone's address, it's because according to the wholesalers and delivery partners, that address does not exist. If we sent a tech out and they found that the address did not match their ticket of work, they would not be allowed to complete the install. I'd talk to the reps at the ISP about how to get your address added and escalate if you need to. It might be as simple as providing a proof of occupancy document and a map.
posted by kinddieserzeit at 1:43 PM on March 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

We had this problem and it was because of something insanely stupid: our street was in the database of the provider (and providers who used their network) as 53d street instead of 53rd. I can't remember how I figured it out, but if there's any other reasonable or unreasonable permutation of your address, sometimes that will solve the issue.
posted by oneirodynia at 9:04 PM on March 22, 2016

You might find the information in this thread useful.

The workaround is, as above, going up the customer service chain - see my answer in that thread about auto-closing customer service tickets, which are the worst.

You will also probably have to sign something saying you are okay with a degraded service, if for some reason your address is outside of their guaranteed service area.
posted by Happy Dave at 3:08 AM on March 23, 2016

When using at&t's website, I have found it helpful to not include directional identifiers or ordinals. So rather than 200 E 14th Street, put in 200 14 Street and hopefully it will allow you to disambiguate from there.
posted by wierdo at 9:52 AM on March 24, 2016