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Domain: swbell.com

Stories and comments across the archive that link to swbell.com.

Comments · 11

  1. InLine Plus also a scam by SethJohnson · · Score: 3, Informative · on Fighting Telemarketers with Technology


    Just an FYI:

    Inline Plus is an 'insurance policy' the phone company will always try to sell you (monthly fee of $3.95 or so). It's supposed to 'protect' you in case your wiring fails inside your house and needs to be repaired by the phone company. If you are a renter, then there's no risk of you bearing the expense of fixing telephone wiring, so there's NO NEED for inline plus. If you are a home-owner, it's highly unlikely that you'll encounter a (phone) wiring problem you can't fix yourself.

    When you sign up for phone service, the salesperson will inevitably automatically add this to the list of services regardless of if they ask you if you want it or not. When I realized what this was about after 10 months of paying for it, I called up customer service and told them to remove it from my account and that I had never authorized it. They refunded me my BACK CHARGES for inLine Plus. It was like $40 or so.
  2. InLine Plus also a scam by SethJohnson · · Score: 3, Informative · on Fighting Telemarketers with Technology


    Just an FYI:

    Inline Plus is an 'insurance policy' the phone company will always try to sell you (monthly fee of $3.95 or so). It's supposed to 'protect' you in case your wiring fails inside your house and needs to be repaired by the phone company. If you are a renter, then there's no risk of you bearing the expense of fixing telephone wiring, so there's NO NEED for inline plus. If you are a home-owner, it's highly unlikely that you'll encounter a (phone) wiring problem you can't fix yourself.

    When you sign up for phone service, the salesperson will inevitably automatically add this to the list of services regardless of if they ask you if you want it or not. When I realized what this was about after 10 months of paying for it, I called up customer service and told them to remove it from my account and that I had never authorized it. They refunded me my BACK CHARGES for inLine Plus. It was like $40 or so.
  3. Simple Solution by dubl-u · · Score: 2 · on Anti-Spammers Wage E-War

    If you really, really can't find a vendor other than one who has junk-marketed you, then at least you should try to hide that.

    If a junk call gives you the idea to get a service, then spend a week or two calling around to make sure you've found the best deal. Then call them and order. This bends their stats to make junk marketing look less effective.

    And to get them to stop bothering you, consider signing up with Private Citizen and something like Privacy Manager. Between the two of them, I get one junk call about every three months now.

  4. Re:Tangent by Dahan · · Score: 2 · on Is Comcast Intercepting Packets?

    Okay, so it can take a couple of minutes to trace a call... but the question is why do the parties have to stay on the call? The calls are logged, right? If the bad guy hangs up, the phone company can still look through the logs and find the originating number. Heck, it's even automated these days--at least Southwestern Bell (my RBOC) offers Call Trace and Call Return.

  5. Re:Tangent by Dahan · · Score: 2 · on Is Comcast Intercepting Packets?

    Okay, so it can take a couple of minutes to trace a call... but the question is why do the parties have to stay on the call? The calls are logged, right? If the bad guy hangs up, the phone company can still look through the logs and find the originating number. Heck, it's even automated these days--at least Southwestern Bell (my RBOC) offers Call Trace and Call Return.

  6. Re:Move on, nothing to see here. by DeadMeat+(TM) · · Score: 3 · on Verizon Email Restrictions
    What if you have your own domain name for E-mail purposes, like if you have your own small business? So much for that, unless the people hosting your E-mail have an SMTP server available, which may not be the case if you're just using it for forwarding to your Verzion POP3 box. Ideally you could set up a SMTP server, but that isn't always feasible in the real world, and if Verizon starts blocking outgoing SMTP (like a lot of ISPs, including mine do already) you're SOL.

    At any rate, if the point is to stop spammers, it's not necessarily going to be very effective, since there's no reason a spammer couldn't give a bogus @verzion.com E-mail address (or, worse, use somebody else's real one).

  7. Re:SWBell.Net by fluffhead · · Score: 2 · on On the Reliability of DSL Providers...
    Oh yeah, I forgot to explain a few things (most of you probably already know about these so feel free to skip it)...

    The PPPoE move is to limit their rapidly dwindling pools of DHCP IP addresses. Apparently lots of folks are connecting Ethernet hubs to their DSL bridges and snarfing more than their allotted single dynamic IP with multiple machines on a home network. They are trying to sell those folks the more expensive 5-static-IP blocks. I don't know if you can use NAT/DCHP and PPPoE together on a BSD or Linux firewall box to get around all of this.

    The rate limiting on news/mail was a particularly galling move, but again it is technically SWBell.net (SBIS) the ISP doing this, not SWBell.com (SBC) the DSL provider. Legally they are separate entities (due to some FCC regs or something). You can check out alternative ISP's at http://www.swbell.com/Prod uct s_Services/isp_providers

    #include "disclaim.h"
    "All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak

  8. Lotsa links! RE: Former customer, Burden of proof by GlassUser · · Score: 1 · on Houston DSL users File Lawsuit Against SBC
    I should have put a .net not .com. Here's a better site, but it's still different. They used to have a link to a DSL info site, with an explanation on the usenet cap, but now all I see is a link to prodigy. This was before the prodigy merger. Google cached the old page but no nested links, so it still goes to the new SBC DSL page. Ick.

    Info on the DSL service

    DSLreport.com has some good customer reviews of SBC DSL, people should read that too.

    Unfortunately, I can't find anything on the SBC site about a cap. I'm going to try scanning DejaNews

  9. Former customer, Burden of proof by GlassUser · · Score: 2 · on Houston DSL users File Lawsuit Against SBC
    I'm a former SBC customer in Houston. What happened is that a few months ago, they had a lot of people sign up for DSL in a huge bout of advertising showers. You couldn't look anywhere without hearing about SBC DSL. They signed all these people up for mandatory one-year contracts. Now in mid-stream, they post a notice on the web page saying "to offer better service to our customers, we've capped our news servers to 128kbps" or so. It's also apparent that they've capped dowload rates to about the same, but they won't admit that.

    When you call to complain, all they say is that they can only guarantee your DSL line speed, not the speed of another site. They repeat that when you say that your friend with a T1 (well, works at an ISP with one) can download at 140 KB/sec give or take, while I get 12 KB/sec.

    At any rate, the suit appears to be over the fact that they signed you into a contract, then changed their side while offering no compensation. In my opinion, this lawsuit is well justified and overdue.

  10. If you'd searched the swbell pages, you'd find by ricOS/2 · · Score: 1 · on ADSL Bandwidth Limiting?
    this

    The guaranteed speed is 384 Kb/s...

    The maximum speed is 1.5 Mb/s

    I think that it's limited on their side... probably through hardware, because everyone seems to have the same speed ratings for their services...

  11. 'Unix workstation...' by cmc · · Score: 1 · on BellSouth denies ADSL for Linux users

    Southwestern Bell's ADSL ' How does it work?' section states:

    UNIX work station (Sun and HP) minimum or 8Mb RAM and 25Mb available on the hard drive

    I talked with the sales rep and technical support -- they said it would work, mainly because it's simply an Ethernet interface to their ADSL connector technology.