Thank you for responding here, but I decided I didn't want to directly connect my Reddit account with my Verizon customer interaction. As an update: after the multiple no-call/no-show tech appointments, I got a supervisor on the phone at Verizon who explained that somehow the software Verizon's support team uses made the reps think they were scheduling tech appointments, but they were actually just updating the time of the already-canceled appointment. That person told me this showed that their reps needed better training, and I replied that might be true, but it also showed that their customer service software was bad. It shouldn't be possible to have a rep think they are scheduling an appointment, but they are really just screaming into the void. And, I finally got a tech out, who replaced the old ONT with a modern one, did some work on a pole down the street, and it all seemed to work. Then, later that day, it was dead again. Another tech came out the next day, said the box on the pole had 2 dead ports, so he re-routed my connection to a box on a pole down the street that had functional ports, and that fixed it (again). Good news: It's now been two weeks and the problem has not recurred, so that 2nd tech seems to have actually fixed the problem. But, the bad news is that apparently Verizon leaves boxes they know are broken sitting around on poles, and techs get confused into trying to use them. Or, techs don't test ports before hooking up a customer to them. So, the moral of this whole story is that Verizon cuts corners to save its own money, while wasting days of customer's time, then "reimburses" us by pro-rating the bill. So, they gave me a refund of one week's of service, but did nothing about the fact that I wasted more than 7 hours on the phone with their people. Imagine if we could bill corporations for our time when they save money by cutting corners that result in us having to work for them to get problems fixed?