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?"

Comments

Personally...

[rusty0101]

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

I'm in the same boat...

[RandyF]

From what I have found you have these options:

1. Satalite (good speed but the lag time causes problems with session-based protocols such as VPNs)
2. Line of site microwave (I'm not going to pay for building a tower on my place!)
3. Paying for a fiber/cable/T1 line (way too expensive)
4. Forming a "bandwidth coop" where the locals string together cable modem lines and equipment and share a single connection somewhere (there was an article on /. sometime back about this)
5. Two cans and a string (Bandwidth is just way too slow...)

Another option is an idea for a grass-roots company to bring high-speed to the last mile...

good luck.

Re:what about the pizza?

[dasmegabyte]

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!

Re:If you really want to escape

[ncc74656]

ok in what world is cable more reliable than DSL?

Las Vegas, to name one example. We have both here in the office, and while there have been occasional issues with our cable-modem connection, our DSL usually only goes for a day or two before the modem needs to be reset.

Most of the DSL problems stem from the service provider not owning the lines...they're stuck with getting problems resolved on Sprint's schedule, whatever that happens to be. Given the weirdness I've also seen with voice service, I'm not convinced that Sprint is up to keeping any type of service (voice, DSL, whatever) going reliably. Cox doesn't have to deal with another company to get line issues, etc. resolved, and when a problem does pop up (which happens much less frequently than with the DSL), it usually gets taken care of fairly quickly. 24/7 tech support for cable-modem service is also a Good Thing.

(I should probably point out that both services are business-oriented, not the garden-variety residential service. I also have the same cable-modem service (at a lower speed level) at home. It costs no more than same-speed residential cable-modem service, but you can order static IPs for it, run whatever services you want, etc. As for speed vs. DSL, the cable modem almost always beats DSL for upstream and downstream transfers around here.)