My carrier has hung up on *me*!

[muckefuck]

Latest annoyance: After five years with them, my phone company has gotten tired of being superior to the local provider I dumped them for and has decided to jack up their fees by 261%. I won't go through how difficult it's been to extract information from them, I'll just say that I'm now shopping around for a replacement--which might mean giving up my landline, since AT&T is pulling out of local service in my area and I still haven't forgiven SBC for all those years of dicking me around. Being a consumer would be so much easier if I simply had no pride.

But I'm sick of bitching about how hard it is to be a well-off, homeowning capitalist. Forthwith: My promised review of last weekend--just in time for the next!

Comments

[snowy-owlet.livejournal.com]

P. and his wife have switched to a broadband phone (Vonage, I think), and they're VERY happy with it. H. and I plan to do the same within the next month or so.

[lhn.livejournal.com]

One thing that concerns me about broadband and cell-phone only options is that they lack robustness in an emergency. The wireline system keeps working in blackouts and doesn't have the same tendency to get immediately overloaded in the event of a high-traffic disaster. (They also work better for giving 911 location details-- the mobile E911 system is being steadily improved, but it's not comparable to the wired system everywhere yet.) And my cable and cable modem have been out many more times in the last few years than my phone service ever has. (I don't remember the last time I had a phone outage, actually.)

I dislike paying tribute to SBC every month, and pray daily not to need help from their customer service department. (And I remember a long day spent in an empty apartment in the pre-cell phone age, waiting for phone installers who never came.) But memories of being unable to reach my parents reliably when they were in NYC on 9/11 make me very leery about cutting that particular cord.

[danbearnyc.livejournal.com]

I'm moving to Vonage, m'self. I had some nastiness from Verizon over the summer and I decided I just didn't need them anymore. First I made the ISP transition from DSL to cable, and that has been running smoothly. Next month I'll transition to the VoIP and will kiss James Earl Jones goodbye.

I will not do the cellphone thing. I'm overconnected with the 'net as it is, and I don't want to be a cellphone slave.