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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?"
Check out http://www.saveonphone.com. They've got a listing of some of the top alternate carriers with their basic stats listed. Many of these use the same lines as major carriers so you're not necessarily getting a lower-quality service.
...ken
Maybe of these can switch your local and long distance. I went with Total Call International due to the cheap intrastate rates...which often are more expensive than LD rates. And they bill every 6 seconds with no monthly fee. So when MCI called to earn my love back and I told 'em the rates, the rep said
"Oh...well, yeah. You got us beat."
-Barkeep, a draft of your most hazardous brew, for the world is slowly stepping into focus, and I don't like what I see.
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'd get the cell for all the voice calls and just keep a very cheap, basic landline service with no long distance plan just for your internet access (assuming your ISP is a local call).
Mcleod is available throughout much of the midwest and doesn't completely suck. I've been with them for about two and a half years now and haven't had any major problems with 'em. They offer all the same services as Ameritech/SBC/whatever and cost a little less. And local calls are just that, local no extra charge. I'd never even heard of "local toll calls" before reading this article.
End of lesson. You may press the button.
I use my cell exclusively for voice. So when I needed static IPs for my servers, and thusly DSL, I called up the good 'ol local monopoly, er, I mean, phone provider here in nyc - Verizon - and it was a whopping $19 for me to just have a line. I told the Verizon lady, no caller id, no long distance, no nothing - there will never be a phone hoooked up to it.
Turns out, the Verizon charge is about $9 and the other $10 are taxes. But still, it's a rip. That means if every citizen in nyc has a land line, there's gonna be at least $100,000,000 in tax revenue. A month! How about a tax break on that?
Check out the "Vision" service from Sprint. It's an extra $10 a month for unlimited usage. There is a USB data cable which lets your sprint phone (I have a Sanyo 4900) work as a USB modem - and yes, it works with Linux. The Sprint Vision service gives you a digital connection at about 56k.
They don't advertise it any more and they don't sell the cable any more. Check ebay for the cable and make sure you have a compatible phone.
Here's a HOWTO for it.
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
Mind you the through-put is about 1b/s.
Good luck Kimosabi!
Cloud City Digital: DVD Production at its cheapest/finest
There are a few basic kinds of CLECs (competitive local exchange carriers).
1 - Local Facilities based: The CLEC has an independent CO (switch site) in the local area and can either extend facilities to you (not likely unless you are buying 2-4 DS1s+ of service) or extend POTS/DSL/DS1 service via copper loops from the closest LEC (local exchange carrier - the old baby bell) exchange.
2 - Non-Local Facilities Based: The CLEC's switch is located somewhere else and simply trunked into the area. They CLEC may or may not have direct colocation in the LEC's COs.
3 - Reseller: The CLEC just takes your order and passes it to the LEC to fulfill. Its still the LECs lines, switch, numbers, etc.
There are also myriad variations on the above. In general if you can get service from a local facilities based CLEC go for it. Most of them aren't really setup for residential (not profitable), but you may get lucky in your area.
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...
A friend of mine got rid of his land line, but there was a fairly serious (for him) consequence he didn't plan on. The local pizza places don't deliver to cell phones.
I recently bought a Sony Ericcson ti-68 from amazon. It was free after rebates, and it is bluetooth enabled. T-Mobile has an internet service plan that is about $20 for unlimited access, I think. Pair the phone with a blue tooth enabled computer and you get about a 56K connection. I tried it while on vacation, and it worked great with my 12" PowerBook. I don't know if this is feasible with Linux or Windows, but you might look into it.
So, your 911 call doesn't exactly have traditional 911 priority, you don't speak to an operator who has your name,address and phone number on her screen, and they won't know where to send the police if your call gets disconnected.
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?"
I have both cable and DSL. The cable costs $42/month and yields real throughput of up to 250k *bytes* per second. The DSL costs $120/month and comes with 5 IP addresses, at a whopping 144k *bits* per second. I live about 2000 feet too far away from the CO for real DSL, and could originally only get iDSL. I'm told I can finally get real DSL now, and it would only cost me $400/month for 1.5 megabit (about 190k bytes per second). If I want to give up having fixed IP addresses, I'd only have to pay $90/month for 1.5 megabit. What a deal! Twice as expensive as cable with no fixed IP addresses or 10 times as expensive with fixed IP.
Because of this, almost everyone in my area has cable, and the throughput seems not to suffer. Of course, some day it might start to suck, and since there's no SLA, we'd have to live with it. But even then it will probably always beat my DSL line, hands down.
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.)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Although I am not quite in the same boat as the poster, the following combo works out pretty well for me.
v combo I could come up with. $150, flat, no long distance charges, etc. I know a lot of people who pay $150 alone for their landline or cell phone bills alone. Other than rent, food, and auto-related stuff, that is the extent of my fixed monthly expenses.
Just for reference, I live in northern San Diego county, California. I can not get DSL (too far from C.O.) nor can I get fixed-point wireless (we tried, but there are trees in the way and my H.O.A. sort of owns the trees). I run a business from my home. The services I use serve me for both personal and business use.
I have cablemodem service with Cox. It rocks. The downstream is awesome. At night it has sometimes even beat the supposed 3mb maximum that the cable company claims.
I can get an analog phone line from PacBell or a hybrid phone line from the cable company, where they put a box similar to a cablemodem at my junction (demarcation) point. I don't have either.
I have $39 service with Vonage, as many other posters do. At least with my net service, it is awesome. Sounds about as good as a land-line and has every feature you could ever want included in the base price... Unlimited LD, caller id, callwaiting, callwaiting id, voicemail, incredible forwarding options, etc.
I have a cell phone from Sprint. Sprint isn't the best company around, but the damn thing works and is priced right. I have more minutes than I could ever dream of using and for like $14 a month I put my mom's handset on my account. Soak up those extra minutes! When I get around to buying a new phone I will be able to use their 64-144k service.
Lastly I have a J2 fax mailbox. It gives me send and receive fax capabilities without paper cuts, a fax machine, or even an analog modem. It just works. About $10 a month.
I keep the vonage number on no-answer forward to my cell and everything eventually dumps into my voicemail.
This entire combo runs me about $150 a month for basically the ultimage telephone/pager/cell/internet/fax/voicemail/cable
You must realize that if you have a telephone jack in your house you may dial 911. 911 is a public service and requires NO telephone company. So why would you use Vonage to dial 911 when you can from a local land line for free???
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