Kevin -- just go wireless. You have a scanner? Guess what you can even get rid of that fax machine of yours.... I got rid of my land line last year. Don't miss it.

Keep calling, keep complaining, maybe they'll terminate your service; and, presto, problems solved.

Kevin,

VONAGE
$26 bucks a month. any feature you want. Includes Long Distance in the US.

It is an absolute no-brainer.

How has old ATT managed to become "New" and swallow up so much of the competition.
Oh I know, the CEO is a genius entrepeneur and deserves billions in compensation.

On the other hand, when I went all in with Verizon and their FiOs system, I got the same phone service quality, far better TV service than Comcast, and faster and more reliable internet service than Comcast for less than I has been paying to Comcast and my previous phone service provider.

So as far as I'm concerned, telecom competition has worked out marvelously.

All that de-regulation was worth it wasn't it.

What to say that will help rather than just create a mutual pain amplification loop?
I feel your pain. (Vote for my wife for president.)

Seriously, we all feel done to by customer service at companies we have to deal. It is bothersome, annoying painful. But we take it as not significant. Compared to Darfur or AIDS or life in Baghdad, it is beneath trivial.
Or is it?
I think it is a symptom of a broader social problem, but one new enough, still emerging, so we do not have even a conceptual handle on it.
At a minimum, the rise in abuse-by-corporate-bureaucracy and the increasing concentration of wealth and power are not coincidental.

They can charge extra if you hook a fax to your phone line?

I thought Carterfone took care of that crap ages ago.

Who the hell has a landline these days? (Among city-dwellers, I mean.)

Key line here:

"the state lifted rate caps last year."

By popular demand? No, by corporate fiat.

We no longer live under a democratic form of government, enough said.

VOIP is the way to go. Vonage service has been a bit choppy as of late, but seems to have improved. All the bells and whistles are included, additionally there are some features unavailable on landlines, such as online voicemail (basically the new heralded iPhone visual voicemail, but on the computer) and you can take your phone wherever you go. Traveling for a month? Take your router and wherever you plug it in, there's your home phone. When I moved, the router came with us and the phone worked, no calling customer service, no transfer charges, and no downtime!

When AT&T refused to confirm or deny that it had given the government access to its records, I switched my long distance to Working Assets.

Wait, socal? I've got PacBell, did they get bought by AT&T too? I haven't been paying attention. I've been pretty happy with my PacBell land line, and DSL - mostly. . .

There's a pretty clear solution here--get a Mac! I hear Apple is making a phone now...

I live in NorCal and got the full package from Comcast -- (Basic) Cable TV, Internet, and phone, the whole thing is about $150 a month and it's been great. I think the phone is about $35 of the total. The modem is HUGE (about the size of a regular box of cereal) which surprised me.

The heck with the old and the new AT&T. Their commercials suck, too, by the way. What's with the lame Oasis-sounding music at the end? It's chopped up so I can't even tell what they're singing about. I think it's supposed to sound like some slacker's ringtone. Or something.

Wow, I don't know anyone who still has a fax machine, most people dumped them years ago. There's this newfangled thing for transmitting documents called "e-mail."

I'm about to cut off my land line and switch to just cell phone. Almost all the calls on my land line are robo-calls for politicians, collection agencies calling for the wrong person, alumni association fund-raiser calls and wrong numbers.

Kevin:

I am a fan of PowerNet Global. They are a long distance company that uses other company's networks to route the cheapest calls. I think they use Qwest for the most part.

Anyhow, no monthly fees at all - just the 0.99 FCC fee and cheap rates for local toll, domestic LD and international.

In some locales (not mine) they are also a local provider. ATT should be able to continue providing DSL to you (if that's what you have) even if they are not your local provider.

Initial setup is a pain since customer service is kind of odd, but once you do it, it's over. After that you can do everything online - see calls you made, pay bills, etc.

You can also setup your cell phone to access their international rates without additional fees (one 99 cent fee for all phones).

Anyways, not to sound like spam, but it was great to find a company that doesn't charge monthly fees. Just pay for what you use.

Kevin,

Did you get notice of this change? If not, it might be illegal as a form of slamming. Similarly, if they were charging you for the added features you did not order, then it would be what's called "cramming", which is another no-no.

Also, it may or may not be legal for them to charge more for fax service, but its definately illegal for them to listen in on your call to hear a fax tone. File a complaint at the CPUC!

Qwest screwed me over twice in the late 1990's by switching my long distance to them without my approval. The regulatory regime in the US has been co-opted into the corporate oligarchy.

Welcome to SBC, Kevin.

In my experience, AT&T is particularly bad. When I switched to AT&T cell service a couple of years ago they told me that they'd be disconnecting my old service and switching my old numbers over, etc. When I got the phones, they'd only switched one number. I called and asked about it and they said that they couldn't get the old number 'ported, but, instead of asking me what I wanted to do, they just went ahead and assigned a new number. I was leaving for a conference and needed a phone, so I kept it. Three months later I found out that they had NOT disconnected my Sprint service (but because I'd moved, I wasn't getting the Sprint bills). I called to complain, but AT&T absolutely refused to admit any responsibility, insisting that "We will cancel your old service AND we will transfer your numbers" means the same thing as "IF we can transfer your numbers, THEN we will cancel your old service." I tried to explain that 'P and Q' does not mean the same thing as 'If Q then P'. They pretended not to understand the point, and insisted that (and this is almost a quote) "any reasonable person should know that this is what will happen." Either they are big fat liars or they are approximately the stupidest people in the universe. (Note: inclusive 'or'.)

I went all the way up the administrative line at AT&T, spent hours on the phone, and never got anywhere.

Sprint fixed the problem in five minutes.

Never, ever, ever, ever, ever sign up with AT&T if you can avoid it.

Ernestine needs to return. Lily Tomlin created the Ernestine character on R&M Laugh-In, during the '70s. At that time, you could ACTUALLY GET customer service on the telephone, and you could speak to a REAL AMERICAN, not some moronic INDIAN INCOMPETENT. However, Ernestine was a wonderful caricature of the arrogance and heavy-handed incompetence of the AT&T monopoly. I think that Ernestine led in some ways to the breakup of AT&T. Now we have AT&T back again, and the breakup was ineffective.

We need a consumer revolt against these assholes. Here's my thought: You register a complaint on an internet service, and do NOT PAY WITH NO PENALTIES your bill until the complaint is satisfied.

One word: Vonage. Here's a revolutionary service, cheaper than any other telephone service, with ridiculously low international rates and many innovative features (simultaneous ringing of several numbers, voice mail in your e-mail, etc.)' on the negative side, audio quality is not stellar, albeit acceptable, and help is really improving, and not as bad as telecom service in any case. Most importantly, it has a base of a couple of million fanatical members (me included). Yet Vonage will almost certainly seize to exist, as will other similar viop companies, because Verizon owns some idiotically general patents and they'll kill any innovation that threatens their monopoly. Welcome to modern American business!

> One word: Vonage.

Three phrases: patent fight. Network access charges. Non-neutral internet.

Why do you think AT&T is fighting so hard against Net Neutrality (and giving so much money to Dem politicians)? As soon as the Net Neutrality requirement is relaxed they will slow down Vonage traffic to the point where it sounds as if you are talking underwater.

Cranky

Fuck AT&T. Companies that help the government spy on individuals without a warrant don't get my business.

Fuck Apple, too. I don't care how cool the iPhone is; companies that partner with AT&T don't get my business either.

In 1998, during an ice storm, I was without electricty for 11 days. I was without a phone for ten minutes.

How do you report an outage by phone if your phone runs on mains AC? And cell sites don't have batteries that last for two weeks.

Sometimes having a couple of things that work without a wall wart are a good idea.

ManOutOfTime:

It actually IS Oasis. ("All Around the World," off Be Here Now.) Goes with the globe logo, I guess...

Good ear.

I don't understand...why are ANY of you still using AT&T? THEY OPENLY LET THE NSA SPY ON YOU! They give carte blanche to the government to spy on all your phonecalls.

Remember, they are subject to a big-assed lawsuit about this.

"VONAGE
$26 bucks a month. any feature you want. Includes Long Distance in the US."

"On the other hand, when I went all in with Verizon and their FiOs system, I got the same phone service quality, far better TV service than Comcast, and faster and more reliable internet service than Comcast for less than I has been paying to Comcast and my previous phone service provider."

The key to getting telecom competition is not being restricted to one infastructure. Deregulation only introduced competing service providers. The infastructure was still controlled by the big boys, and they did all sorts of uncompetitive things to hobble the CLECs. So we moved from regulated monopolies to unregulated ones.

The Internet set-up of packet neutral end-to-end communication takes the infrastructure out of the equation. That is what makes Vonage a real player. It is also why AT&T hates network neutrality.

Verizon is spending a lot to provide a parallel infrastructure to cable. Thus this is a case of redundant, but competing infrastructures. That is why we have real competition there.

I think in some states it's actually illegal for phone companies to charge you more for less (i.e., charge you more for a basic plan without features). I dunno about California. But just because AT&T is doing it does NOT mean it's not illegal.

> I don't understand...why are ANY of you
> still using AT&T? THEY OPENLY LET THE NSA
> SPY ON YOU!

It may escape your attention but SBC has bought everyone except Verizon and renamed themselves AT&T, so there is essentially nothing left for telecomm service out there. Yeah, Qwest, Sprint, and a few small fry are still scrapping around but essentially Whittacre has acheived his lifelong goal of being "President of T".

And your second point is moot because no matter who you buy your service from (and esp if it is Vonage) the chances are 95% that it will travel over the AT&T backbone at some point in its route from Here to There. AT&T can spy on it then if it wishes regardless of who your endpoint carrier is.

Cranky

Hacksaw: So as far as I'm concerned, telecom competition has worked out marvelously.

Which pretty much sums up the conservative creed: it's all about us.

I use OPEX for LD, less than 3c/min. I plan to shed other AT&T facilities like DSL as competition allows.

One thing a true landline phone can offer you over Vonage is the probability of it working after the earthquake.

The phone companies used to take pride that their systems could be relied upon come hell or highwater. Specifically, landline phones would work even if the power was out.

I live in an earthquake free, hurricane free, tornado free portion of the planet, so I use Vonage. But if I lived in an earthquake/fire/hurricane/tornado zone, I would definitely keep a good old POTS system around.

For people who don’t track telecommunications news routinely:

SBC Communications announced an agreement to acquire AT&T on 1/31/05.
http://sbc.merger-news.com/materials/am.html

On 10/27/05, SBC announced a plan to begin using the AT&T name for the combined companies

http://www.att.com/gen/press-room?pid=4800&cdvn=news&newsarticleid=21850

SBC Communications acquired Pacific Telesis, a holding company (Regional Bell Operating Company or RBOC was the industry term) which owned Pacific Bell and Nevada Bell, back in 1998.

SRS

Wait, socal? I've got PacBell,.... osama_been_forgotten at 1:06 PM

Damn FIOS! It is supposed to have been coming to my 'hood for ages but where is it?

Take the advice of everybody telling you to switch to Vonage. Cheaper, more services, less hassel. I like calling my sister in France for free. I like having my calls bounced to my cell phone when I'm away from home. Why does anybody still use MA Bell's descendants?

I don't know anything television and Internet services out there, but aren't there some sort of companies that offer bundles of cable, Internet, and television service all in one for about $100 a month? If my mom switched, like I think she did, then there hasn't been any disruption in service.

There's also the possibility that the things are convoluted and that the person on the phone is either lying or incompetent. Two stories I have here involve Verizon and getting a new cell phone contract, which happens to be with AT&T, and the third one involves just AT&T.

The first may not seem like a big deal, but it just seems like an example of carelessness to me. When I called Verizon to find out why I was signed up for a new contract when I went into the store to look at phones, I was told that because I was separating myself from my mom's plan, I had to be signed up for a new one. I don't remember signing anything, but legally, if that's the case, that's the case. It seemed like my error. But trying to ask the Verizon store where I went that day, where I was signed up, a few question wasn't working, because the store itself had a voice messaging system. Each time I hit the number for customer service, I was told nobody was there and I had to leave a message. This was at 1-2:00 in the afternoon, on a weekday. I finally decided to try another number, for sales, and then asked to speak to customer service, I was either told I was already speaking to them, or I was connected. I just found it odd a major phone company couldn't get its act together at one simple store.

But that's not all. When I finally decided to go with AT&T, I thought I could cancel my contact without problems because of the thirty-day guarantee. Not so, I was told, because I wasn't a new customer that had switched over from another company. Okay, it's my fault again. So I searched the Internet for some loopholes, and after being shot down a few times, I finally found a page, complete with a script, that had a way for me to get out of the contract. It had something to do with me not having a texting plan and rates being increased for people without them, which meant I could cancel the service because Verizon violated the contract. So when I called up and was asked if there was anything they could to do keep me, I said no, I just wanted to cancel. After I had asked if I would be charged the $175 early termination fee, the woman told me no, not in this case. This contradicted what someone else had told me earlier in the day, but I took down her name and the time I called. Of course, when the bill came, the charge was on there. I called up to have it taken off, which it was, but I won't be surprised if I have it on there again when it arrives, along with a late fee that I was told I wouldn't have to pay.

Now I have AT&T. I am pretty happy with the coverage and I love my phone. Being somewhat lazy, I waited until a day or so before the bill was due to pay it over the phone and Web site. Each time I tried both ways, I've been told that there's some sort of error or system maintenance. The woman said not to worry, because due to the company itself and its lack of preparedness or something, it wasn't my fault I couldn't pay the bill on time. That was last Friday, and while I've tried throughout the weekend, yesterday, and just a few moments ago, I keep getting error messages.

Welcome to the brave new world of telecom competition. It's working out well, don't you think?

Comparing things to how they were in say 1980? Of course it has. Perspective, Kevin, perspective.

Welcome to the new age of monopolies and trusts.

This just shows that the "new" AT&T is pretty darned cocky, and that they are betting on three things:

(1) Customer service can be treated as a "cost" that can be pared down to the bone. But on that subject, they share virtually all of the other telecom companies in the hall of shame.

(2) That you, the customer, are stupid and can be treated like a rube ... and that you can be pushed around without much recourse, unless you are one of those people who makes the leap to VOIP or the local cable company (who are typically rotten to deal with as well).

(3) That the state and federal regulators are out to lunch or ideologically disinclined to do much on behalf of consumers in this "competitive" market. So the regulators are not going to do anything meaningful to watch out for you or other customers -- particularly if AT&T unilaterally stuck a bunch of crud in their tariffs that allow them to mess with your local service configuration and rates -- something convenient called the "filed rate doctrine."

As far as landline long distance providers, I recommend Qwest. Good prices, good service, have their own fiber-optic network nationally. Their long distance service (and customer service) is better than their local phone service ... which is outside your area anyway.

Having hornswaggled the public, the politicians and the regulators into letting them re-establish their vertically-integrated monopoly on landline local loops ... maybe they are right on all three counts.

-- Bokonon

I live in San Francisco and I was going to cancel my landline and just use DSL and my mobile phone. But my landlord then put in a new doorbell system that rings through to your home phone. So I'm paying up the wazoo just to buzz in the UPS guy.

Seldom use the land line. Figured we should keep it for comms redundancy in quake country, though.

Had a family crisis recently and decided that we should have busy call forwarding on the land line to one of our mobile phones. We contacted what used to be "Pacific Bell", and which had then morphed into "SBC", and which is now "The New AT&T", and which for all I know going to be called "Tweedledee and Tweedledum" next month.

I submitted the order, indicated what the busy-forward target number should be, got a confirmation, and that was that. Except for one thing. I had forgotten the all-important rule of dealing with modern Corporate America: when and if you are told something by a representative of said Corporate America, do not believe a word of it until you have obtained independent verification.

It turns out that the busy-forward had in fact been set up wrong. And AT&T had pointed it at a nonfunctioning number in an incorrect area code. So when we thought we were covered and would get every potentially important incoming call, such calls were in fact getting a "cannot be completed" robot message. Great. Just great.

Finally got their error straightened out. It cost me only ninety minutes of prime working hours. What a bargain!

--

I did see the little mailings announcing the advent of AT&T California, but paid little heed.

Terrible phone service. The scratchy connection suggests they are using that switchbox down the street again, the one that was nearly decapitated by the runaway truck several years ago and that the old AT&T had consequently abandoned.

I'm paying more too.

I'm a neanderthal who does not want cell phone service, but it sounds like it's time to drop the land line altogether.

DO NOT USE VONAGE!
DO NOT USE VONAGE!

It's crap, I subscribed for five months, incoming calls were ok, outgoing calls were routed to some low bandwidth network, was god-awful.

You should check around in your area and find the competitor to Vonage and go with them. They will have enough bandwidth. I switched months ago to the next best in my area and it is awesome and dirt cheap.

I note that SunRocket a large competitor to Vonage today went belly-up, passing their 200,000 subscribers on to other VOIP providers. If they were passed to Vonage, don't call them, they'll be pissed.

"Hello and thank you for calling AT & T. How may I give you excellent Customer Service today?"

"That's an excellent question."

I'm in South San Francisco and cellphone service is spotty on my hillside and I've had Verizon and Cingular. So, even at higher cost, I use my landline at home even for long distance.

And ditto regarding power outtages. My phone keeps working. Since my luxury priced Comcast Internet goes down a few times per night (what do you expect for $50/month?), I would hate to have my phone calls dependent upon that.

I would love to get a satellite dish for TV, but Comcast will raise my cable internet to $64 if I cancel regular cable. And DSL isn't in my neighborhood yet --perhaps never.

So much for this free market Republicans have been ballyhooing.

Quit grousing about the deregulation, it is reasonable to deregulate charges now that Vonage and co offer an alternative.

What is neither reasonable nor legal is to cram charges for services that were not requested.

The fax line business smells to me of lawsuit time. AT&T are a common carrier, if they discriminate in that way they blow their common carrier status.

We went through all this in the 80s when AT&T tried its best to kill the Internet. They lost.

PHB, Kevin isn't grousing about deregulation per se, but about the monopoly that land line telephone service has become.

As an ex-AT&T employee with a husband who is a current employee, I can assure you, this clusterf*** extends to the internal working of the company as well. The only reason we have AT&T long distance at home is the free minutes my hubby gets from being employed there.

[sarcasm]Long live the Death Star.[/sarcasm]

Vonage. Cheap, and they don't mess with you.

Haven't tried it with a fax, but still. Get away from the regular companies -- they're all terrible.

Welcome to the brave new world of telecom competition. It's working out well, don't you think?

You're goddamn right it is -- that is, if you happen to be the CEO of the "new" AT&T.

I guess the old slogan still applies: "We don't care, we don't have to."

Quit complaining. If John Kerry had been elected in '04, al Qaeda would be running the phone company by now.

I keep my services diversified -- DirecTV, Sprint for my cell, and AT&T (SBC-Yahoo when I started) DSL. It's not that much more expensive than the Comcast type bundles, and that way I can only get screwed over on one of them at the time.

The thing about AT&T that really burns me is the fees they stick on. I have the $10 basic service (they don't sell bare plans at my DSL speed), and they very nearly double it with the various fees, only a dollar or so of which actually government mandated.

My long distance carrier is Working Assets. They contribute part of their income back to progressive causes at the end of the year. You get Ben and Jerry's coupons for the first year, too.

The basic problem here is that POTS is an extremely reliable system. Sure there is are alternatives like Vonage and cell phones (which is great) but I see two difficulties there. First, AT&T is going to try and get rid of net neutrality to eliminate Vonage. Secondly, POTS is fundamentally different in being much more reliable. We should have non-monopoly POTS options. This is just sensible. What we have currently is a clear violation of the principles of anti-trust law. There is no reason I shouldn't be able to have an emergency telephone line at my house for $5/month. Period.

I had to let go of my landline when 'The new AT&T' came online.

...First, the new AT&T took over the billing department, changed everyone's billing codes but kept AT&T's machines, stationary, and didn't say they'd changed anything.

...Then they didn't take over any of AT&T's actual credits or debits. So suddenly AT&T still owed be a hundred bucks, but the new AT&T said I was in hock to them.

...Legacy AT&T's support ended up having the old machines, stationary, that AT&T depricated more than a year before the merger.

...Legacy AT&T was farmed out to India, as well.

...New AT&T refused arbitration with Back of America.

...New AT&T refused to honor my landline contract - so I was being charged per-minute for phone calls that should've been covered under my flat fee.

...New AT&T increased the flat fee.

...And the charge for voice mail, etc, etc.

So the lesson is? I've got a new cel phone. It cost me $20 more to have an additional cel phone instead of the $40 I was paying Legacy AT&T, let alone the $60 that 'new' AT&T wanted.

SBC SUCKS.

Why are we letting them rape AT&T? They're the ones who sued to break up AT&T when AT&T Broadband was offering land-line, cel phone, and cable as a package.

T-Mobile has just started their wireless program. If you are a T-Mobile user and are in a wireless hotspot (Starbucks, college campus, hotel) and you have the wi-fi phone, all your calls from the hotspot are done through the hot wi-fi and are FREE. If you have wireless internet at home, that makes your home a wi-fi hot spot too. T-Mobile will be offering several better phones with this feature, and in 6 months, I think I'll be upgrading and my land line is GONE. No more Verizon bill.

Oh, and the local loop as a topic reminds me of this. It was reported a few weeks ago that Hillary Clinton had come to the Valley to raise money at a convocation of technology executives.

At that gathering, she highlighted the slow pace of residential broadband adoption in the US.

(Whereas many other advanced countries and economic competitors are closing in on 98%+ broadband penetration, the US lags far back in the pack at about 66%. And the speeds we get are laughably slow compared to those offered to consumers in other countries. And we pay a lot more for this crappy slow service.)

Hillary called for an engineering R&D effort to fix this.

Which caused me to fall out of my chair in helpless laughter. What the US has is not a technical problem. What we have is an antitrust problem. The real reason why broadband is slow, rare and expensive in the States is because the RBOCs, the regional Bells, have been allowed to exert such a stranglehold on the last-mile connection.

When it was proposed to open up that last mile, and let the market work, the RBOCs said that the last mile was *their* goddamned network, bought and paid for, and they were not about to let competitors on to it.

And asserted the privilege with straight faces. This despite the fact that the RBOCs had been granted preferential rates for decades by their regulatory boards, rates which were intended to defray the costs incurred in the building of the network!

So what we had, in brief, was the Bells taking their networks, which had been built with generous public subsidization, and claiming exclusive ownership of, and benefit from, those networks.

How appropriate for the era of George W. Bush. Public costs, private profits. Just as in so many other spheres of modern America.

But wait a minute. The key legislation and regulatory rulings which enabled this elephantine money grab didn't get pushed through under Little Boots. No, those date back to the 1990s. To the administration of... could it be? Yep. Hillary Clinton's husband.

What I would like to see would be an aggressive engineering R&D effort to rid the nation of Clintons and Bushes alike.

--

What's wrong with this?

False Advertising. AT&T isn't AT&T. It's SBC. Their deals they're trying to sell you are not available.

Bait and Switch. The add-on services you are being advertised are not the ones available. Comcast does this, too.

Slamming. Offering a service and switching you to it without your express permission. Or offering a plan that doesn't do what the rep says it does.

No local 911 service. Vonnage, Comcast can't offer 911 service. Only local land lines are required to.

No emergency service. Vonnage, Comcast don't work without power - nor are any cel phone providers required to. A disaster or even just a cable cut in your neighborhood can interrupt your service - and the providers aren't required to lift a finger to fix it.

I can't get a local landline from another service anymore. SBC put them all out of business. Cel phones and VOIP solutions aren't required to meet the same standards - and even if they were, VOIP can't.

And I can't choose a different cable company, either. Satellite TV isn't allowed in apartment complexes anymore.

Where's the competition?

Bleh, makes Noel Gallagher's selling Oasis' All Arpound the World to them for their theme in commercials even more sad.

Dammit! This didn't happen when they were Ma Bell!

Is everybody confused? Thank you, that’s just the way Telecom want’s it.

Bokonon at 3:02 explains it well as do many in this post.

I have worked for “The Telephone Company” for 40 years. Sure the name has changed a few times but many of the same concepts remain.

One of the important concepts is “Keep the customer confused”.

Bottom line…The less you know, the more money we make!

And it’s all legal.

What a coincidence! I myself was just today highly annoyed with AT&T's customer service AND website when trying to start new local service. I seriously considered ditching a landline altogether to avoid dealing with another SBC/ATT/Verizon experience. But I succumbed to tradition anyway. Nonetheless, these guys are going to run themselves out of business with their great customer service/squeeze tactics.

Handing the Internet over to these guys so they can sell movies and destroy net neutrality sounds like a fine idea. Just fine. Really, what's not to like?

Let me throw in my 0.02 AUD (soon to be worth $0.02 US: have you *seen* this graph?) in favor of Vonage. We brought our box to Sydney, and our US number continues to work flawlessly. The only problem is explaining to callers that yes, they called a NY number, but it really is 3am out here.

Geez, for comic relief from all of this telecom misery I need to dig up a clip from the "The President's Analyst":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUa3np4CKC4

Rather salient and funny film considering the times nowadays.

One thing of interest to me: no comments about the field techs who work on these admittedly antiquated landlines... as a field tech for "the new at+t", I have to convey that we are being pushed to do almost twice as many installs and repairs per day versus just ten years ago. We are also being told that, somehow, miraculously, improved quality of service will emerge from the productivity putsch, and that safety records will improve too. They also track us with in-van GPS systems, which were pushed past our paper tiger union to "improve safety"- that's why some poor guy spent hours unconscious in a gorge, only to be found after his panicked wife called in when he never came home from work. The real uses are, of course, intimidation and harassment.
Strangely, most field techs still try to do a good job, perhaps because we get all our positive feedback from happy customers- customers who will also tell you point blank if you blow it. I like that, but I get yelled at more about our call centers than for anything else. They know this- and the largely automated call centers they use now are modeled on the same horrible technology that generated enough anger among the old at+t customers to put them in a position to be bought by SBC. It's all about executive compensation, NOT CUSTOMER SERVICE.
We are all being micromanaged to death out here, and treated as if all the woes of this company are ours to rectify. In fact, it's some cynical Texas jackass in his penthouse suite playing King of the Hill with his secretaries who needs the discipline, and we all know it. We are pretty well sick of it too. Watch for a huge drop in service quality early in 2009- the old guys like me are ALL RETIRING before the next contract so we can hang on to the few benefits we didn't lose in 2004. The only techs staying are in serious debt or unable to find a better job. Fair warning- it isn't getting better- in a hurry. Of course, if everyone goes wireless, that's just gravy for them- cel sites are pretty low maintenance- but land lines are still way more dependable than a signal I can jam with about five bucks worth of off-the-shelf gear. Welcome to the new at+t- your bill, distended.

Heh. You guys should move to rural Vermont. When I have a problem, I call the local company and they greet me by my first name and inquire after my cat. The "tech" who comes to deal with things is the owner of the company. I pay about what I paid for service when I lived in the Boston suburbs, but there's no goddam automated voice menu crap when I call, I get Mary or Martha at the desk.

Out here in the middle of nowhere, I even get DSL more than 5 miles from the central office. OK, it's really, really slow, but it's fast enough so I'm not playing solitaire while I wait for a page to load.

Same goes for the power company out here, btw. When there's an outage, I call and talk to an actual person, who tells me what happened where and what the guys on the truck said the last time they called in.

I don't think you're getting economies of scale from the biggies like Verizon and AT&T, you're just getting worse service and more grief and incompetence. The people who run my phone company, like everybody in small-town rural America, better do right by their customers or they can't hold their heads up in front of their neighbors at the general store or in church.

Trust the corporation. The corporation is your friend.

gyrfalcon:

how are the local phone companies set up in vermont? when i was growing up in maine, there were dozens of local companies, many of which only serve two or three adjacent towns; calls to a town covered by another company were "long distance" calls.

one third of the kids in the local junior and senior high schools were covered by a different company, and in fact, their town still has its own independent phone company. that's where my sister lives now, and when my mother calls her, she pays as much as she does to call me in hawaii.

on the other hand, the local company was small enough that everyone in town had the same prefix, so the local phone book (which was very slender) simply listed everyone's four-digit personal number... and you only had to dial four digits to reach an in-town number!

SBC isn't very interested in acquiring companies with fewer than a thousand customers, so the tiny local companies may survive, as is, for quite a while longer.

As many posters here have noted, your POTS ('plain old telephone service') works when the power is out (as long as your phone isn't too fancy).

Your cellphone may well not (and in any case, everyone will be using cell, which will flood the network. good luck getting through).

Remember on 9-11? The payphones still worked, even though the cell phones didn't (here in London, they apparently shut off the cell phone networks-- the terrorists are prone to using cell phone bomb detonators). And the Blackberries worked (paging network).

Landline often works when the power line is *down* too, as telephone lines aren't necessarily disrupted.

The universal service obligation on the main telco has historically been harsh: they usually have a maximum number of hours to restore service, mandated by the Regulator, and with penalties. The Regulators get very jumpy at the idea of an 87 year old grandma who can't reach the EMS.

So: brush fires, earthquakes, ice storms, big thunderstorms, tail ends of Atlantic hurricanes, recurrent grid failures due to peak demand in summer or winter? These are features of places with even relatively mild climate (the power was out in part of the Borough of Queens last summer for over 2 weeks)?

All exactly the moment when you might be trying to reach emergency services *or* get hold of your Mum to find out if she is alright.

You'd better have a land line. Not VOIP.

Well, if you (and others) switch carriers to someone more reasonable, and "The New AT&T" dies an ignominious death, then yeah, deregulation will have done its job.

I have had many problems with ATT over the years. I lived in one apartment complex for eight years with spotty service to the point that my phone service would regularly go out, usually on weekends, sometimes for a few hours, sometimes all day. Since at the time I did not have a cell phone, I could not reach the service department to report the problem. Once the service came back on ATT said it could not "see" the problem so could not fix it. This literally went on for eight years. Then I moved one mile down the street and had no issues for the year I was in that apartment. After I moved to my current residence I declined to get a land line and just used my cell but now my cell service (Cingular bought by ATT) was spotty so I finally got another land line. Having heard of the "hidden fees" ATT charges I grilled the rep upon signup and was assured my basic plan of $26 was ALL I had to pay, no set up, no fee to get out of the agreement, nothing hidden. Yeah right; my $26 dollar bill turned into a $118 bill. Among the charges were over $40 in fees to "add" the 13 calling features which were advertised as included in the package. I called and got a rep who said she had heard the same complaint twice that day and would credit me the fees back on my next bill. We'll see...

Why not record all customer service calls? Most of them start off with a message telling you that your call may be recorded. If you sign off on being recorded, doesn't that same OK extend to you recording them? Any legal scholars out there know what the legalities are?

I think your AT&T (SBC) experience is all too typical. I don't use them for anything anymore. After they took 18 months to fail to install a DSL line the first time I ordered it, finally telling me the only way they could solve the problem was for me to order another one. After they automatically switched me to electronic billing when I got the DSL line, at the email address they gave me, which I never used. Then when I didn't get any bills, so didn't pay them, I got cut off and had to spend many hours of phone calls getting back to paper billing. But then they didn't send any bills at all, paper or electronic, so cut off again with no bills. Finally got that straight, and about 8 months later an AT&T rep comes by to sell me their great new package of phone, TV and internet service. But when I said okay, the rep called and found out I wasn't eligible because I had late payments in the last 12 months. Within two weeks, I switched all my services over to another provider. Oh, and then there was their provision of my "private" phone call records to the NSA. I wish Qwest competed against them where I live. I hope never to deal with AT&T again. Their customer service reps are all very nice all right, but their corporate procedures are all screwed up. In my book, they're pretty much the worst company in the US.

The cell phone reception in my neighborhood is really terrible so I need to have a landline. I had a really great low flat rate for all local calls with ATT and then without informing me they raised my rate almost 5 times the original amount! I was so pissed off that I switched to Verizon even though it's not much better.