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Experiences with Alternate Local Phone Companies?
chasmosis asks: "In the last few months, I've moved about 25 minutes outside of St. Louis and discovered that the local baby bell charges exorbitant rates (at least in my view). I've explored alternate local carriers like Sprint and others who have had uncompetitive prices, poor customer service records, or were unclear on things like 'specifically what exchanges can I call that are still considered local calls'. Right now I'm on SBC's Metro plan where I can call to and from much of the St. Louis local area as a local call instead of a toll call. I'd dump my landline entirely and get another cell if I didn't need it for dial up internet, since I live in the sticks and there is no cable, no DSL, and the top speed for dialup is 28.8. What are other people using for alternatives to their local telephone provider? What are your experiences, good and bad?"
Just get a cellular/mobile phone. All of my friends that have tried alternate phone companies (like from the cable company) have had really hard times getting things working right. The ones that have just gone straight to mobile have been much happier.
I know it's no good for the poster of this story, but for those with cable or DSL, check out Vonage. And tell them you were referred by user timandjeni - vonage@timandjeni.com ;^)
Do not read this sig.
I use Vonage as my non-cell phone. However this is because I do have a Cable modem connection. So this is no help to you.
If you can live with the Cell phone for phone service, you might want to look to DirectWay, or StarBand (or others) to provide Internet service. Response times might not be as fast as dialup, but even with fair use caps, you will probably get better data rates than dialup.
Good luck.
-Rusty
You never know...
I don't know if t-mobile is available out there, but I heard they now offer a $20 unlimited data option, so you could use your cell phone for internet access.
Another option is an idea for a grass-roots company to bring high-speed to the last mile...
good luck.
--==-- I've found Karma to be a relative thing... Ya know, the kind you invite to Christmas...
You should check out whether your cable company offers digital phone service. Cox Communications does in many locations, and they claim to have similiar uptime to regular phone service, but much cheaper prices.
I would have gone with them when I moved to California, but at the time they didn't have the service available in my neighborhood. I'm still hoping to check them out sometime.
These people knocked my socks off. I called them up on a Friday asking for DSL for my company's office, there. Surprisingly, we were within range and everything looked like it was going to come off great. Then she dropped the bomb on me:
"Now, you understand that this may not be ready until Tuesday, right?"
Tuesday?! That's only 2 business days for DSL! Believe it! It doesn't have to be 2 months!
This is going to be month two on Vonage for me (voip phone service through a cable modem) and its a good service but...
1. They have significant voicemail problems. I think the consensus at dslreport's voip forums is that they are overselling/pushing their VM system too hard or they just expanded too quickly. Its not just lost VM but sometimes my phone wont ring when VM is enabled. Workaround: use a plain-jane answering machine. Afterall, you get a normal POTS phone jack from the Cisco ATA they send you.
2. Be mindful of you upload speed and what apps you're running on your home lan. You don't want to use this when kazaa or whatever is maxing out your upload cap. Throttle bandwidth to leave yourself 100kbs. Vonage also has a 30kbs compressed codec for people without much bandwidth.
3. Of course, if you lose network connectivity (or power for that matter) you lose phone. That probably isn't much of a concern in a world of cell phones, but its something to consider if you don't have a cell phone and are far from your neighbors.
The pros
1. It sounds excellent. Its POTS quality as far as I can tell. Think of it as MP3 compared to CD.
2. If you're already paying for broadband its a smart investment. Telling the local monopoly to piss off is very gratifying. Not to mention you have built in number portability. Just plug that Cisco ATA anywhere and you have your old phone number.
3. The geek quotient of using VoIP without the other party know or asking, "What are you calling me on, a damn tin can?"
So make your own pizza. It's not hard. Buy some frozen crust ($.79 or so) and leave it on the counter before going to work. COme home, roll it out. Can of Furmano's tomato sauce is $.79. Brick of good whole milk mozzerella is $4, i use about half. Then, do it up how you like. I add some grated romano to a half cup of ricotta, black pepper, minced garlic and finely chopped pineapple and put a layer down before the mozz.
10 minutes at 500F and you can kiss PizzaHut goodbye.
Don't let the stodgy food industry keep you or your family from decreasing your communications costs! I spend around $220 per month in those (cell phones for me, my wife & my mom $97, telephone $35, i-net & cable $90) and would love to reduce. But i'm so lazy!
Hey freaks: now you're ju
I got hit hard when I found out that CA had not only inter-LATA charges, but INTRA-LATA charges.. basically toll charges within a given area. Then I found out that Costco offered toll phone service.
Costco will give you any needed local or long distance charges through their provider. The company is MCI, but you are getting it as if you were going to provide it to other people rather than end user MCI service. You're getting what the phone companies buy.
5 cents a minute, no monthly fees, and you are billed on 6ths of a second. My SO and I got tired of times when the bill was lower than the cost of a stamp so we sent them a moderate size check and haven't heard from them since.
"Would you rather have a playstation addicted dork wearing a star wars t-shirt?"
...although their services may not be what you need.
I was running a small business which did about 10,000 minutes a month on its 800 number and had relatively modest data requirements. They split a T-1 (half voice lines, half data) and gave me a good price for three services (local phone, data and long-distance). The quality was far superior to what we had been getting from our Plain Old Telephone Service (POTS) provider (Qwest).
If they offer what you need in your area, I would definitely recommend checking them out.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
I used Telebright to figure out what was the cheapest provider for me (it turns out the cheapest provider was Power Net Global). Telebright is on the up-and-up and Consumer Reports actually forwarded me to that site (Consumer Reports strives to be as vendor-indifferent as possible). You type in your calling patterns (e.g. 600 minutes/month evening 200 minutes/month daytime) and they'll tell you what the cheapest plan is (from MCI, AT&T, Sprint, and other providers). Telebright makes their money by actually hooking you up with the LD provider (the LD provider pays the fee). Of course you can bypass them if you want to and sign up directly, but it doesn't save you any money. --Brian
You will also get your service yanked for this.
I have heard of people who were obviously using their cell phone as a modem, which is not allowed in their ToS.
Sprint will basically tell you to either buy their real data connection with those Merlin cards ($100 a month I believe), or pay for all the bandwidth you used (1 or 2c/kb I believe).
I would not recommend going the "PCS Vision through Cell Phone to computer" route unless you're very courageous/stupid.
If you absolutely have to, and don't want a local line at all, use the $100 Sprint Wireless Data modems. You can actually pull about 12-13 k/s typically (for me at least) off of them, with about modem latency (200-350 pings).
Cavalier (CavTel) kicks much arse. For anyone on the East Coast who can get it, do so. They are about half the price of Verizon, offer more services, and are extremely helpful when you call them.
And plus you don't have to deal with Verizon.
The only problem is Verizon doesn't like it's customers switching, so as others have pointed out getting switched is an issue. Verizon screws up the orders on purpose usually meaning you will go a day or two without service. Verizon is losing you as a customer, so they really don't care if you complain or not. I know of a dozen or more people who have had them kill their service a few days early when switching.
And Verizon also tells techs your loop distance from the CO is too long when you order CavTel DSL. However a few persistant phone calls will force them to actually send out a tech who will report this is not the case.
In fact, two friends who had Verizon report to COVAD their loops were two small got sales calls from Verizon trying to sell them DSL just a week or so after they were told it wasn't possible.
My suggestiong is any solution other than Verizon is good. They are evil bastards.
-S
-Sternn