Last summer, a manhole fire knocked out Verizon telephone and DSL Internet service at an apartment building on East 127th Street in Harlem.

Verizon didn’t restore service to the building until Friday of last week, about seven months after the outage began. Needless to say, the owner of the building is angry at Verizon—and also can’t figure out why his building doesn’t yet have Verizon’s fiber-based FiOS service. Verizon made an agreement with New York City to bring FiOS to every household in the city by June 2014, but many buildings still don’t have access.

“You can’t turn around without seeing a pitch for Verizon FiOS,” the building owner, Vernon Williams, told Ars. “It sounds great.” Williams figures that his neighborhood is a lower priority for Verizon because there are fewer customers per block than areas with high-rise buildings.

Further Reading Verizon tries to avoid building more fiber by redefining the word “pass”

We’ve been exchanging e-mails for the past four weeks with Williams and his cousin, Clyde "Sam" Conway, both of whom live in the building. They say DSL Internet at the building is painfully slow even when it works, with download speeds of 0.5Mbps to 3Mbps. Since the outage began they’ve been getting refunds from Verizon and using Time Warner Cable Internet, which is much faster than Verizon’s DSL but not as fast as FiOS.

We’ve also been in touch with Verizon’s public relations department, which confirmed the months-long outage.

“A Con Edison manhole fire knocked out phone and DSL service to this building in August,” Verizon told us on February 11. (Williams said the fire was in August but that there were connectivity problems even before that.)

Verizon further told us, "We made several attempts to secure right of way to install FiOS in the building and we were not successful because the property owner, and neighboring buildings from which we would also need to secure right of way from, were unresponsive.”

That was news to Williams—who co-owns the building with a relative.

“I would hardly call myself ‘unresponsive,’” he said, noting that he has given Verizon access to the property on several occasions. “In my opinion it is Verizon that has been unresponsive.”

This isn't the first time Verizon has blamed building owners for the company's failure to extend fiber throughout the city. Mayor Bill de Blasio has been trying to force Verizon to complete the city-wide buildout, but Verizon claims it has already met its obligations.

The Verizon spokesperson later acknowledged that the initial statement to Ars about Williams being “unresponsive” was inaccurate. “But there are a couple of neighboring buildings we still would need to secure right of way from in order to do FiOS,” Verizon said. The spokesperson said he "can't" say exactly which buildings Verizon needs access to.

“Any time there are buildings between one property and the main street where the fiber runs, we need to get right of way from each one in order to bring the fiber all the way through to the building that has requested FiOS,” Verizon said. “This is a pretty well-known obstacle we run into in the city. Sometimes we can get around the other properties using a technology called microtrenching, but that was not a viable option here.”

Finally, a solution

Building access was also a problem when it came to fixing that DSL and phone outage, Verizon said.

“In order to fix the phone/DSL in the building, we’re waiting for a property owner in the vicinity to allow placement of Verizon facilities,” Verizon told Ars. “This property owner is currently undergoing renovations which they expect to have completed this month [February]. We hope to receive the go-ahead to commence repairs shortly after.”

For normal repairs, Verizon wouldn’t have to access another property, but the manhole fire presented a unique problem. “In this specific case, we're waiting to install a DLC [digital loop carrier] cabinet in the nearby building,” Verizon said.

The building in question had been condemned, leading to the renovation, Conway said. Ultimately, Verizon seems to have found a different way of restoring service. “They apparently took a different approach and didn’t go through the renovated building where the old equipment was housed,” Conway told Ars after the problem was fixed last week. "To hear the techs speak of it, there are a few issues with the wiring from Fifth Avenue, but they grabbed us good lines from the cable," Williams said.

After months of fruitlessly asking Verizon to fix the outage, Conway said, "I didn’t believe it but it’s done." Conway and Williams said they think Ars' inquiries to Verizon may have something to do with the long-overdue fix.

Another building on nearby Fifth Avenue also lacked Verizon phone and DSL service for about seven months until it was fixed about 10 days ago, according to an e-mail Williams received from the building’s owner. The building owner, Gitta Rott, confirmed to Ars today that service was finally restored on February 20 after being out since mid-July. "All they had to do is switch wires from one area to another in the phone box in the cellar and voila I had a dial tone. That simple!" Rott said. "But for weeks they were telling me that I need to get a new line pulled in from the street."

We asked Verizon about the Fifth Avenue building last week but haven’t received a response.

Williams said the Verizon technicians who fixed their service "had a list of about 30-40 other customers who were impacted and said that they would be on the block again this week to continue restoring service."

Conway said he is happy to have his landline phone back but is considering a switch to Time Warner Cable. Williams said he plans to keep Verizon’s phone service for emergencies, though he is using TWC Internet.

For all their problems with Verizon, Conway and his neighbors still like the company’s fiber service. Conway said that neighbors he has spoken to “would be perfectly happy with FiOS but that doesn't seem to be an option even though there are fiber optics right there on Fifth Avenue. They sent someone around one day to collect names and numbers so they could contact those people about receiving FiOS but not one person was contacted yet (three or four months later). It's as if Verizon really doesn't want our business or simply doesn't care.”

Correction: This story as originally published incorrectly identified Williams' co-owner at the East 127th Street building.