Dumping Verizon
Here in New York, our local telco is Verizon, a monopoly provider of traditional telephone service. For the last three weeks, my phone hasn’t worked and neither has my DSL.
Both Verizon and my new DSL provider have been incredibly incompetent throughout, and I still don’t have service. I won’t list my travails here, but suffice it to say that all my problems started when Verizon was supposed to switch me to a competing DSL provider. I believe Verizon is being purposefully uncooperative to prevent me from switching.
The hours spent on Verizon’s tech support merry-go-round convinced me to seek other options, and happily I have found one. Using a software package called Asterisk, it is possible to get telephone service over the internet for negligible money ($2/month for the same base services I currently pay about $40 for).
We use Asterisk at work. It’s just like using a regular phone. Every once in a while I have moments of poor sound quality and each month it will go down for an hour or so. But it’s incredibly cheap, and you never waste a whole day waiting for a tech who never shows up.
I have an old computer gathering dust. I’m going to install the software, buy the $80 bit of hardware I need to connect it to my phones, and never bang my head against Verizon’s walls again. It’s great to watch a monopoly crumble.
September 19th, 2006 at 2:27 pm
That makes two of us that hate verizon.
September 19th, 2006 at 3:53 pm
three
September 19th, 2006 at 5:42 pm
It’s going to make me really happy to pay next to nothing for telephone service. A friend of mine paid $50 up front to his VOIP provider. That was six months ago and he still hasn’t used it up.
There’s serious price discrimination between people who are tech inclined and those who are not. If you’re willing to stick the software on an old computer and buy the interface card, you can get VOIP at almost zero cost. If you need to use somebody else’s box and want a lot of hand-holding it’s going to cost you a minimum of $20 a month plus a higher per-minute charge.
September 21st, 2006 at 10:47 pm
I’m a happy vonage user, and have been since the first month they offered service. In that time, I’ve only had one major problem; which was resolved by a firmware reset.
$25 a month, all the local and long distance I want for free, including canada and western europe; $5 a month for a softphone for my PC, $5 a month for my own 800 number.
I can get my voicemail anywhere, either over the net, or by phone. I can provision a phone number in any area code in the US for $2 so people can dial a local number to call me; and I can bring my ATA with me wherever I travel to take my local phone service with me.
Honestly, the only thing I would change, is reduce the cost for a second phone line ($20 a month).