McClelland, Scott wrote:
I know there has been discussion about cable modem vs DSL, but I wonder
what arguments you might have for and against Cable for phone service.
Pros:
Since AT&T took over PacBell, my phone bill doubled. Time Warner offers
a flat rate.
Cons:
One disadvantage I see with cable, is that if the power goes out, so
does your phone service.
I guess I could also save money by switching to DSL, but that's another
issue. The point is, I don't see much savings from combining a package.
[snip]
Scott McClelland, BSCIS, CNE, MCSE, RHCT, A+, APS
We switched from <whatever Ma Bell is called this week> to Cox telephone
mainly because of lousy service and seemingly random pricing and
billing BS, which seemed to change every other month.
o Cox provides 24/7 support for all their services. With Local Baby
Bell, it's near impossible to get a human on the phone at /any/ time
of day.
o Cox's long distance is billed by the minute, and if you don't use it,
there is no charge, period. IOW, no long distance subscription fee.
o As bad as Cox's support can often be, Ma Bell's is far worse - it's
never their fault no matter what your phone does.
[BTW, we've had the power go out here and the Cox phone still worked
fine. The phone is not hooked into the coax, it's a separate line from
the pole, which, thru their outside-on-the-house box, attaches to the
existing POTS wiring.]
When we looked at pricing, Cox was only a very little less than Ma Bell
for local service, although the pricing looked better when you started
to add more features (actually, Cox has (had?) more free features in the
basic local service package than Ma Bell).
Because my wife is disabled and uses a TDD, she gets a TDD line for
$4.99/mo, no taxes[1]. She also gets an additional voice line for
$4.99/mo (+tax), so we pay about $16+/mo (tax is more than line) for two
lines. I think she would get this deal with Ma Bell also, although maybe
not at the same price.
-----
[1] She rarely uses the TDD anymore. Now she makes calls using the
California Relay Service, which can be accessed with her Web browser.
Much more convenient than dealing with the stoopid Dial
phone-then-put-handset-into-modem-cradle nonsense.
--
Best Regards,
~DJA.
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