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• Wednesday, February 11, 2009 07:11 PM

  @greenman, I hear you now...

  I agree that nothing beats a landline, but between the telcos and and FCC, they are killing landline service.

  I have access to Qwest in Denver and wanted the cheapest landline service, which is supposed to be about $14.99 a month for basic unlimited incoming calls and metered outgoing calls above a certain number of minutes per month.

  Fine, I just want people to be able to call us if we need to talk with clarity.

  Well, first thing was, "someone" sold our number to the telemarketers, and the damn phone was ringing off the hook. So, call to Qwest, how about caller id?

  Well, you get that as part of a "package" and though they told me that I would get a special bundle deal that was supposedly cheaper when you include call waiting and call forwarding (I never use either - the person who invented call waiting has a special ring of hell reserved just for them), my first landline bill showed a whopping $59 after custom calling fees, FCC taxes and incidentals.

  I won't go into the head-smashing hassles and numerous lunch hours spent on the phone and in the Qwest office ("Yes, I know that our customer service has some issues") getting the service disconnected and our money back.

  It's no wonder that Qwest was the only telco not to turn over customer calling records to the NSA - they can't even find them for their customers...

  I settled for landline service from Vonage (VOIP), and while not perfect, this works great for us as long as we don't use the internet too heavily when we're talking.

  Qwest (our internet DSL provider) does not offer very high speed where I live (yet) and I refuse to pay COMCAST for internet service, so voice quality sometimes suffers - but we call back and then it usually works fine afterwords.

  Vonage is $34.99 a month for two lines and unlimited USA long distance, and free calls to specific European cities.

  This in combination with grandcentral.com lets us block & screen calls. Oh, and T-Mobile is my work cellphone and almost always works everywhere. My company pays $25/month for what is effectively a corporate voice / data unlimited plan, while my wife pays $79 / month for virtually the same service, on a consumer plan.

  Someone needs to form a co-op and aggregate cellular service for consumers under a corporate plan - it's dramatically cheaper, even if the phones aren't always subsidized.

  —vaporland Read vaporland's other letters
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