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The Phone Company wants to invest my money.

Started by Mooseherder, October 02, 2008, 03:07:19 PM

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Rocky_J

Glenn,
I disabled long distance calling on my home phone years ago. I refuse to pay a monthly charge just for the ability to make long distance calls on my home phone. All my long distance calls are made on my cell phone since I can call nationwide toll free. Dropping the long distance service resulted in a drop in the taxes portion of my bill as well, so my savings was more than just the base rate charged by AT&T.

Mooseherder

Quote from: Rocky_J on October 03, 2008, 06:39:31 PM
Glenn,
I disabled long distance calling on my home phone years ago. I refuse to pay a monthly charge just for the ability to make long distance calls on my home phone. All my long distance calls are made on my cell phone since I can call nationwide toll free. Dropping the long distance service resulted in a drop in the taxes portion of my bill as well, so my savings was more than just the base rate charged by AT&T.

My issue is they are also my Internet Provider and my plan is all bundled together.  If this weren't the Case, I would have dropped them all Ready. :D
I have a business issued Cell Phone and really don't want to deal with Cell providers either.  It is just another bill you don't need.
Looking into other options and will probably go with Comcast for internet.  It is just a pain in the butt changing stuff around.

Warbird

That is what they bank on when they do this sort of thing to established customers.  They figure most folks will not go through the pain of making the change.  I say go for it.  Let us know how it pans out.

Rocky_J

Just so you don't misunderstand me, I still have a home phone. I just no longer have a long distance provider billing me a monthly service charge in order to allow me to make long distance calls. I still have local service and until a year ago I also had DSL internet service through the phone company as well. But they weren't billing me for long distance 'service'.

easymoney

boy did i get a shock with my last phone bill from at&t. my ex wife was in the hospital last month and she called me collect 3 or 4 times from the hospital. i could not believe the charges. just a few minutes can run 20 dollars or more. :o that is thievery. but my basic phone is a bargain. i do not have a long distance carrier and i get a discount for being a senior citizen with limited income so my normal phone bill is less than $5.00 per month.  i still hate at&t.

Tom

AT&T got on our wrong side, finally, several years ago when they continued to add services to our bill that we hadn't ordered.  Having them removed was a pain in the yingyang and you had to forever be on your toes to catch them.

We decided that we didn't need Long Distance Service and canceled it.   We bought a fistful of calling cards and use them.  We speak long distance for about 3¢ a minute now.  When we are in a place where our cell phones work, we suffer no extra charges for long distance.

Mooseherder, I have been on comcast broadband for years.  I love it relative to any of the other choices.  There are times when I get exasperated, but they aren't too often.  I'm sure that competition would help the prices, but there is only one cable company here.

We looked at bundling the cable phones with the TV and Internet, but resisted.  I'm glad we didn't do it now.  When the power goes out, all of our neighbors, who have phones on the cable, lose their phone service.  Bell South (I think AT&T has bought them) still uses powered lines and we have one phone in the house that will work as long as the lines aren't down.  For safety's sake, it is worth having a landline.

SwampDonkey

I had the long distance networking charge removed from my bill to. I never even put it on there to start with. They did it years ago as far as I can tell when they bought up NB-Tel. Now when I call long distance I use YAK dial around and i cans till call long distance anyway without that long distance plan. I wouldn't spend $2 a month long distance, most months zippo.

We even have two charges now for 911 service and if you have 3 phone numbers at the same address you pay on all 3 at the same residence. They have become like banks, and swimming in profits from all these nickle and dime charges.
"No amount of belief makes something a fact." James Randi

1 Thessalonians 5:21

2020 Polaris Ranger 570 to forward firewood, Husqvarna 555 XT Pro, Stihl FS560 clearing saw and continuously thinning my ground, on the side. Grow them trees. (((o)))

ellmoe

   I've got Embarq and have to pay $%/month to NOT have long distance service. >:( I did this because they tried to charge for two 900 calls at $(.95/minute that I did not make. I got them removed but it was a PITB! Long distance phone cards are the way to go.

Mark
Thirty plus years in the sawmill/millwork business. A sore back and arthritic fingers to prove it!

Mooseherder

We decided to keep the Phone company for now because only other option for fast internet is cable and we are having problems with cable. ::)
The intermittent outages have stopped but now we are paying for and not receiving the Food Channel, HGTV, and the Comedy channel.  The ones mentioned are the ones I like and there are a couple not worth mentioning. :D

DanG

Only one thing is consistent in the Telephone biz these days, and that is that you never know who you're dealing with.  AT&T went belly up a few years ago and the name was bought by somebody else.  Their assets were broken up and sold off to other companies.  Most of the Bell companies changed their names and either bought up other companies, or were bought by somebody else, or bought each other and then spun off segments and merged with others.

Here's an example for ya:  Sprint was a joint effort by General and United to get into the long distance biz, then General sold their part to United, then Sprint got bigger than United and merged with it's own Mama.  Then they bought Central Tel, who I worked for, then recreated United and merged it with Central, then dissolved both of them and put them under the Sprint name, then spun them back off to create Embarq.  Meanwhile, several cellphone networks were created and sold off and others were bought and spun off then merged with.

There ain't no tellin' who y'all are trying to deal with.
"I don't feel like an old man.  I feel like a young man who has something wrong with him."  Dick Cavett
"Beat not thy sword into a plowshare, rather beat the sword of thine enemy into a plowshare."

Warbird

Quote from: DanG on October 30, 2008, 03:14:17 PM
There ain't no tellin' who y'all are trying to deal with.

If you are getting internet through your phone provider, there is a somewhat easy way to find out who you are dealing with.  Just open up a terminal window/shell (command window for you Winderze types) and do a traceroute to some site such as www.google.com or www.yahoo.com.  You can then run a whois against the IP addresses in that route between you and google (or whatever).  That will tell you right quick who your ISP is getting their service from.  ;)

SwampDonkey

They have been recently hashing over this broad band access for us rural folks, again. It was suppose to be for everyone 4 years ago. Apparently, it was cut short by government funding, since the providers deem in unprofitable to absorb the install cost, which most of us rural folk ain't gonna pay. Not ever.  ;D If the rate is over $30/ month I still don't want it.  :-X
"No amount of belief makes something a fact." James Randi

1 Thessalonians 5:21

2020 Polaris Ranger 570 to forward firewood, Husqvarna 555 XT Pro, Stihl FS560 clearing saw and continuously thinning my ground, on the side. Grow them trees. (((o)))

SwampDonkey

In XP the path is, from the "Command Prompt":

C:\Windows\I386>

the command is tracert

In Unix is was traceroute, which was before windows.
"No amount of belief makes something a fact." James Randi

1 Thessalonians 5:21

2020 Polaris Ranger 570 to forward firewood, Husqvarna 555 XT Pro, Stihl FS560 clearing saw and continuously thinning my ground, on the side. Grow them trees. (((o)))

Larry

Quote from: Warbird on October 30, 2008, 04:07:14 PM
Quote from: DanG on October 30, 2008, 03:14:17 PM
There ain't no tellin' who y'all are trying to deal with.

If you are getting internet through your phone provider, there is a somewhat easy way to find out who you are dealing with.  Just open up a terminal window/shell (command window for you Winderze types) and do a traceroute to some site such as www.google.com or www.yahoo.com.  You can then run a whois against the IP addresses in that route between you and google (or whatever).  That will tell you right quick who your ISP is getting their service from.  ;)

Judge Green broke up the Bell System along with the AT&T monopoly into maybe a dozen or so regional telephone companies.  Southwestern Bell (later SBC) became the king of the hill and picked off a bunch of the profitable companies one at a time.  AT&T was there final acquisition...for a while preceding the acquisition AT&T bonds were either near or actually rated JUNK.  The name AT&T was the gold standard for service so SBC changed there name to AT&T.  I worked and retired from SBC...through the years I got to work in a lot of the regional telephone companies on storm breaks, strikes and such.  SBC even though it has a lot of faults was the premier company, at least in my eyes.

I wouldn't put much faith in a tracert either...leased lines are the name of the game and they have been around (for you old folks) since "O" carrier.
Larry, making useful and beautiful things out of the most environmental friendly material on the planet.

We need to insure our customers understand the importance of our craft.

SwampDonkey

To get to the forum, my provider shoots me up north to Edmundston, then down south to Halifax, then shoots over to NYC.
"No amount of belief makes something a fact." James Randi

1 Thessalonians 5:21

2020 Polaris Ranger 570 to forward firewood, Husqvarna 555 XT Pro, Stihl FS560 clearing saw and continuously thinning my ground, on the side. Grow them trees. (((o)))

DanG

Quote from: Warbird on October 30, 2008, 04:07:14 PM
Quote from: DanG on October 30, 2008, 03:14:17 PM
There ain't no tellin' who y'all are trying to deal with.

If you are getting internet through your phone provider, there is a somewhat easy way to find out who you are dealing with.  Just open up a terminal window/shell (command window for you Winderze types) and do a traceroute to some site such as www.google.com or www.yahoo.com.  You can then run a whois against the IP addresses in that route between you and google (or whatever).  That will tell you right quick who your ISP is getting their service from.  ;)

I think yer missing the point, Warbird.  What I'm saying is, these companies, and company names have been bought and sold so much that nobody knows who owns or operates their local phone company anymore.

Also, a traceroute only gives you the ISPs through which you connection is being processed.  It doesn't tell you that you went through Seattle, Miami, Boise, and Nashville to get from Fairbanks to Anchorage, and that was just for your transmit leg.  Your recieve side might have gone through Chicago and New Orleans, with a brief layover in Boston to get back to Fairbanks.  And that doesn't take into account that all of these paths are actually in a "ring", so that if a bus crashes into the point of presence in Chicago, your signal is automatically reflected to Detroit, only to be assigned a new path by the National Data Base in Dallas or Nashville or Denver, and rerouted to the next available trunk to Pittsburg and on to Charlotte to get back to New Orleans where a new path is selected via New York, and all without you ever hearing a click.
"I don't feel like an old man.  I feel like a young man who has something wrong with him."  Dick Cavett
"Beat not thy sword into a plowshare, rather beat the sword of thine enemy into a plowshare."

ely


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