A few days ago, Verizon Wireless announced with great fanfare that people in their initial handful of supported cities (including here in L.A.) could use a locator site as of this morning to check for availability of the new Verizon Wireless 5G Home Broadband service, which supposedly touts some impressive specs. Actually, we should call it “5G” with the quotes made obvious, since it’s not really a standardized 5G yet, but let that pass for now.
The locator site has been present at least since that announcement but said that you couldn’t actually check addresses until something like 5 AM PDT this morning. So this morning I decided to check my address. I didn’t expect it to be covered — I heard rumors that Verizon’s initial coverage of L.A. would be very small, perhaps centered on downtown L.A., and I’m literally in the other end of the city in the distant reaches of the San Fernando Valley.
The site apparently did enable its address checking functionality this morning. Well, in theory, anyway.
The page has an annoying overlay curtain effect when you touch it (that was there several days ago as well) but as of right now the “Check availability” link immediately punches you through to another page saying that service is not available at your address — before you’ve even entered a physical address. Are they trying to guess your approximate location based on your IP address? Naw, that would never work — too prone to error, and think of all the people using mobile devices who all appear to be coming from carrier gateways.
Hmm. There is a “change address” link — and you can actually enter your address at that one. Oops, still says not available at your address. But, wait a second. Whether you enter your address directly or not, there’s a note under that unavailability announcement:
Server is temporarily down, couldn’t able to process the request currently.
Wow, this is starting to feel like a phishing site with a backend coded by someone who clearly wasn’t a native English speaker.
And checking again just now, the site is still in this condition.
Not an auspicious beginning.
–Lauren–
