WatchHate for ATT is permanently etched in my brain after dealing with them for many years for my DSL service. They forced me to also pay for a local landline though I didn't want one, they kept raising the fee for DSL without telling me, and no two bills were ever the same price! Each bill was an amazing list of constantly changing obscure fees, lately about $52. And of course it's not easy to get a human at ATT on the phone if you value your time. Oh, and the service sucked! The speed was OK when it worked, but ATT DSL stalled very frequently, and I'm sure the problem was not with our computers because the stalls happend no matter which computer we used.
So I switched to sonic.net 3 mbps "naked" DSL for $40/month and I'm very happy with it so far. It's definitely far faster than ATT DSL and doesn't stall like ATT used to. Here's the list of standalone (no landline dialtone) DSL plans from sonic.net:
http://sonic.net/solutions/home/internet/fusion/
We cancelled our local line and will just use TMobile for regular cell service because TMobile is way cheaper than ATT's iPhone plans.
One hazard in cancelling: ATT lied to me or was mistaken about several things when I asked them to cancel my service.
* ATT claimed that DSL would be shut off Monday at 5pm, but they did it overnight on Sunday, leaving us without DSL for a bit.
* ATT claimed that we'd get 60 days of free dial tone service, but they cut that off too. It's too painful to navigate their voice jail system to complain.
Sonic.net did not pay me anything or give me any discount for this post. I really am thrilled to have escaped ATT entirely, perhaps for the first time in my life!
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Alexandria, VA
Two kind of people you don't want to deal with over the phone are those foreign service representatives that don't know what they are talking about, and those domestic assholes full of lie and attitude. With AT&T, you're usually getting both. Congratulation to you for getting outta that.
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Saint George, UT
elliemae's website
Congrats!
I was raring for a fight with Verizon - my son was gonna write a song & produce a video that would have let them know how much I care... but they gave me what I wanted. Sorta. They didn't apply my second to last payment - so it's another letter off to the CEO.
Huge corps don't care about people. Good for you, Patrick.
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Portland, OR
FYI to all those who have gotten rid of their land line service: you still have 911 service, well, most of the country, anyway. Some rural areas are still without.
So keep a phone plugged in to the jack just in case.
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Saint George, UT
elliemae's website
How do you test it without calling 911? Just curious.
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Portland, OR
elliemae says
You gotta a smart dog...just blame the dog when they answer:O)
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San Antonio, TX
jvolstad's website
I checked my address here in Millbrae and am qualified, but I like my Comcast connection for the speed. I use a VPN at home and it likes speedy lines.
I will however, tell my landlord about this service. He would like to dump ATT DSL and phone service. Their entire family have cell phones.
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46 male
Menlo Park, CA
Premium
How fast is the Comcast connection? Sonic.net has much faster speeds than the 3mbps I got if you want to pay a bit more.
But I don't have cable TV at all and maybe that's one reason you want Comcast. We just watch stuff on the internet, or DVDs.
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Patrick, I do not have cable TV at all either. But I jumped in on a Comcast special of 19.99/month for 1 year of cable internet. I do not know the speed but I think it was advertised at 12mb/s. Keep in mind I did not hack their modem or anything (which can easily be done. As a matter of fact, I have an uncapped cable modem that is not in use right now). According to Speedtest.net at the Palo Alto location, my download speed is 68.82mb/s, and upload is 3.27mb/s.
Of course this can slow down during peak times. But I'm always able to download at a 300kbyte (not bit) per second rate. When using bit torrent, speeds are in the megabytes per second; not kilobyte.
If not for the special promotion I got in on, it's about $50/month + $5 dollars/month for the modem rental which you can always just buy yourself for $70.
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Two things: I had DSL in Spain - awful. When it went down nobody could figure out how to fix it. You simply had to sign up with another company- No prorating of fees already paid either. Try negotiating all that in a beauracracy. Believe it or not, the USA is a marvel of efficiency compared to most of the world, even to most of Europe. I am happy with Time Warner: we do a pkg deal for phone, security, TV and internet. It is not cheap; however, they are wonderful at both phone service and house calls to fix a variety of problems.
If you dial 911 in many locales, the police must, by law, show up at your door. They will check that everyone is alright. Ask me how I know. In our case my daughter was dialing Europe - a long convoluted dial-around. The police said this happens a lot. I felt so guilty to waste my and other tax payers money, but I understand why they do it.
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Beverly Hills, CA
Good job Patrick! I did the same and am a satisfied SONIC.NET customer at 40/mo for 5 mb/s. YOU MUST ASK for the first years introductory rate! Excellent and knowledgeable tech support they don't lie or pretend to understand things they don't. Whoosh I wish most tech support people stopped making up stuff. Its a tough job and I wouldn't want it---and don't have the patience for it, but why lie?
AT&T---When I had them I would call tech support 5-6 times to listen to the many different answers, so I had a clue what was REALLY going on. Our "last mile of copper" on the AT&T fiberoptic has been terrible for 5 years. They finally decided to fix it---and still are---its been three months of ripped up streets and jack hammers. I think they forgot the real reason they are out there?
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I don't get it. DSL I assume travels though phone wires. How is sonic providing DSL over wires owned by ATT? Browsing their site amazingly they don't even bother to explain.
I've never had a problem with sbs/yahoo/att whatever they are. Had a technical problem with the wiring a few years ago. Guy came out withing a few days, fixed it withing 1/2 hour no charge.
Looked into ditching the landline, but the the way they price it, you don't really save much.
Did not know that about 911, Leigh. Will have to look into that. Still have a land line but haven't used it in 3 years. Just have an answering machine that says don't even bother leaving a message.
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Shawnee Mission, KS
I'm paying about $35 a month for AT&T and so far they're much better than TWC or Surewest. Of course when they crash interesting things happen. Latest crash caused me to lose any email address with ATT, SBCGlobal or Yahoo as provider. When I pointed this out to AT&T, the rep said, "Let's concentrate on getting you up again." Yeahhhhh, let's do that.
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repo4sale says
MetroPCS failed me years ago. But these people were referring to home internet. Not cell phone service :)
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MarkInSF says
Actually, the lines are leased by Sonic. Regardless of which DSL company you go for, ultimately it is AT&T that really provides the service.
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46 male
Menlo Park, CA
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The way I understand it, AT&T is required to lease the copper lines from their local central office (CO, which is the middle three digits of your phone number) to any DSL provider.
So Sonic must be paying AT&T to connect to the copper, but Sonic is the one actually providing the internet service to me now.
It's kind of nice that an anti-competitive monopoly was recognized in spite of lobbyists, and that a little free market competition was introduced. Gives me more faith in our system.
I think something like that should be done with trains too. The owner of the tracks should be required to let other companies run passenger rail cars over them for reasonable compensation. A little competition would make rail service much more pleasant.
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San Antonio, TX
jvolstad's website
Patrick says
I'm running the 12mb/s connection. Works pretty good and only one time was it not working when I needed it the most. (middle of the night page and I could not log on remotely)
I was using DSL when I was working in London. Very fast. Why is it that we are behind the times here in the US?
I don't need the TV part of the cable (I get free Dish TV from my landlord), but I got basic TV as having TV and Internet as a package is cheaper then just Internet alone. Go figure. It's a little over $60 a month after all the taxes and fees.
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Redwood City, CA
We have fewer problems with DSL because there are so few people "involved". Essentially there is AT&T providing copper wire, covad providing DSL, and then in this case Sonic providing Internet. Usually Covad is the one you want, because it's almost never Sonic, and almost never AT&T, and if it is, Covad will get AT&T out there. I've had a bad line though at work for about a year, I was going to cancel it but it's backup line and it's 3x faster than our other lines. So even though it flakes out, I keep it because it's a true backup. But I had Covad out here multiple times and finally they all wore me down with "Is it fixed yet?" just mailing that out every day, without ever doing anything. :D
So to answer the question about "it's all AT&T" it isn't. AT&T provides the physical wires. Covad provides the DSL equipment which puts the internet on the phone lines. When it gets back to the central hub, that is where Sonic/AT&T/Etc take over. Sonic then connects you into their Internet backbone. *THIS* is where it makes a difference. Some hubs are over loaded - eg you get 50 people really into full time bit torrents and the internet provider only provides a limited amount of bandwidth. So you get 100000000mbs to your house, but you get 1mbs throughput because it's stuck at their hub. Usually it's not a problem, but the "zippy speed" improvements Patrick is seeing, are likely due to better backbone usage on Sonic.net's and a better sharing policy and/or usage policy.
My rants. I had Cingular for a few years, and eventually had to get rid of them. They didn't have bill pay, they didn't send out disconnect notices, they didn't do anything other than cut your phone off! And without any way to reconnect it, without finding another phone! It was my only non-autopay bill, and I missed it a few times, but it was like $30/month or something! After one month they were doing disconnects! argh. They cut me off a couple of times, and eventually I said bye to them. I never had this problem anywhere else, and never missed any bills but they had no way to check bills online, no way to pay bills online, it all had to be done through their little mailing envelopes. I bitched and said to them "It's not like you don't know how to contact me! You could phone me, send me a text message, or at least let me call YOU after you disconnect me!" AT&T has pissed me off way too many times. I won't even try verizon. I ended up on t-mobile and they worked out pretty well for a long time. I switched to prepaid because I had such odd calling patterns, and now it costs me a fraction of their simplest plan! Of course I don't text anyone, or use it for internet or anything else. I'm starting to lean towards erudite behavior. :)
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46 male
Menlo Park, CA
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pkennedy says
But I can't keep my cellphone number or keep my iPhone if I switch to prepaid cellular, right?
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Menlo Park, CA
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jvolstad says
I'm pretty sure the US is behind the times because corporations have figured out that it's more profitable to limit competition through lobbying Congress than it is to provide good cheap services. It's corruption, caused by inbreeding between the business and government worlds.
Great list of all the ways corporations prevent the free market from working, often with the blessing of Congress:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-competitive
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203 threads
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Davis, CA
I've been a happy Sonic.net customer for 5 years now. Welcome! I love it when my neighbors tell me they get AT&T or (retch) ComCast but are always grumbling about the service. I have the the most expensive Elite-S package from Sonic.net and love it. I share it with one neighbor by a wire buried shallow run to their house, and another by WiFi. Neighbors pitch in everyone wins.
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Chula Vista, CA
I canceled ATT after they failed to properly re-connect my DSL service when I moved. This happened TWICE. The 2nd and last time our connection speed was below even their slowest speed package. They sent several technicians to the house who told me the lines from the street to my home needed repairing. They said they would come back to make the repairs and never did.
We still have the phone service because I like complaining, and we built up about $37 of credit with them. I went with Cox cable because they offer 10mb download speeds, and I've never had a problem with their speed or service.
ATT worked fine at our old house, and really never had a problem except for the reconnection after a move. Sorry to hear your experience was so much worse.
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I still don't understand why it is that in Silicon Valley, commonly considered to be the birthplace of all things internet and high tech, internet service sucks so much.
I used to commute on VTA on the Mountain View line from San Jose to Sunnyvale. That line passes right by the offices of Cisco, Juniper, Redback, NetApp, Yahoo, Wyse, Hynix, Polycom, and within spitting distance of Google, Intel, AMD, nVidia, EMC, Redhat, Mozilla, and many others.
No wifi on that line. Cell phone service dropped constantly.
My options for high speed internet are asyncronous connections from Comcast, FIOS with ATT, or some DSL flavor...and all of them are not static IPs, have crappy upload rates, and are overpriced for what you get.
Best service I ever had was Speakeasy DSL with 3 static IPs...and it was slower and more expensive than Comcast.
Personally, I blame the myth of the free market.
edit: oh, and ebay. I forgot ebay.
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I go into the hell last month. I had T-mobile for 8 years in row now , most of the time pay as you go. I was so fond of iphone so I had to jump into AT&T hell. Lat week I made a call at 8:55PM assuming I will will free night at 9:00PM, to my surprise I was charged for 160 mins (8:55PM to around 10:00PM). I called the rep and fought with her for 30 mins , she was so adament to say that any calls made befor 9:00PM will be charged for full length not pro-rate. What a hell?!! waiting to complete another 23 months to go back to t-mobile or something new.
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Down in Florida, any cell phone (without a plan) has to be able to dial out to 911 regardless. Check if your state has this. No LAN line needed anymore. Comcast is HORRIBLE down here, and ATT is reliable but they don't have any decent fast lines...
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I also recently got Sonic.net Fusion and really like it. I'm on the dual bonded pair plan which uses two lines for faster speeds. I cancelled my AT&T phone line and it feels good to do so. Sonic will be offering POTS voice lines over Fusion soon and I will likely sign up for that depending on the price.
For now, I'm using VoicePulse VOIP service for voice since I need a line for occasional faxing and for the gate entry system in the building where I live. I'm actually paying a lot less than I did with AT&T and getting a lot more such as fancy voicemail, call forwarding, caller id, etc. All for $15. a month.
Another good reason to get Sonic.Net Fusion is that soon you will be able to get even faster up speeds and adjust it yourself on the fly based on your bandwidth as a whole. (Called Annex M)
Sonic.Net seems to continually innovate without detriment to their customer service or reliability-they must be doing something right!
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Redwood City, CA
You can switch your number to prepaid. I just called up t-mobile (expecting a fight) and said I would rather be on prepaid. They said I couldn't use it until I had prepaid time, but switched me over for free and gave me a $5 starter credit which amounted to 15 minutes or something! Anyways, I load up online for about $90 for 1000 minutes, good for a year. Unless you're going to buy $100 worth of time, it's not worth it.
You can call 911 on any cell I believe, anywhere. I believe 911 works as well on any phone line, and I think 511 (telco repair number?) so you can setup service from that line! You can even dial 911 on cells that are locked! It will simply override the lock!
The big issue with the bay area is that everything is spread out! It's expensive getting a big fat internet pipe somewhere. Dropping off high speed connections from it is cheap, but you have to do a lot of them, and they're distance sensitive. So in the bay area, they drop a dsl hub down, but then no one can reach it because they're too far away! Same with fibre, it's expensive, but once you get it into an area it's cheap to do the last mile with, but around here, once it's dropped there are no customers!
Around here we have such a mess of expensive housing, business offices and poor mixed together that it's hard to drop these expensive home solutions off into areas where the ratio of sales to hub are so horrible!
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To reinforce pkennedy - I have switched a cell phone # from a postpaid to a T-mobile prepaid. T mobile is nice and cheap (10c per min if you buy $100 at a time) but coverage is not very good. And in some rural areas where AT&T and Verizon have coverage, they have nothing. If you have t mobile postpaid you can roam on AT&T towers, but with prepaid you cannot.
If you drop a land line, you can call 911 on a cell phone (paid for or not) but the 911 on a cell phone experience varies. I called once to report a traffic condition, and it was busy! Another time I called to report some other traffic hazard, the dispatcher said he would connect me to CHP, and that was it. The third time (traffic problem hazard again) I got through. So, one out of three. Not that great. Therefore the landline is worth it to me. Plus the landline voice quality is better than cell phone.
I use comcast internet. $62 per month including basic cable. Download is about 15 mb or so, upload is 3. Pretty reliable, maybe I reboot the modem once per three months. Overall it's pretty good. Could be cheaper I guess, but for what I want (internet plus basic tv) it's cheaper than AT&T uverse, or basic cable + dsl.
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One more thing -some time ago I had DSL provided by someone other than AT&T (Speakeasy?) over AT&T lines. I had a problem at one point, and my vendor blamed AT&T. Which may be true but didn't help solve the problem. So that's a potential problem with sonic, if they have a problem requiring AT&T's help, AT&T may not be so helpful to their competitor.
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Sonic pays AT&T to rent space in the CO and for the lines so AT&T has obligation (legal and otherwise) to provide good lines from the CO to the customer MPOE. In fact, I had a problem with one of the pairs after my Fusion install (wasn't getting the speed it should) and Sonic worked with AT&T to get it fixed in a timely manner.
I used to have Comcast and their line was not reliable at all and also their speeds can be quite deceiving. When you run a speedtest with them, you get the 'speed boost' speed but in reality, after the first several MB, they throttle your speed down to not much faster than DSL speeds. Further, they have bandwidth caps implemented now. With Sonic.Net, there is no data cap and they actually don't mind at all when customers run servers and things like that.
SiO2 says
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Mountain View, CA
Premium
comast in Mountain View
12 MBps down
3 MBps up
$50 / month
I am no fan of Comcast. But their service has been amazingly stellar, very few outtages if any.
Recently I got a flyer claiming that I qualify for AT&T Uverse. It sounded tempting, so went to their online site to compare their offering with COmcast. UVerse costs more monthly than comcast.
Any one has switched from COmcast to AT&T Uverse in South Bay? What is your experience like?
PS : No LAND LINE here! why pay $30 bucks / month so you can get telemarketing calls at all times *grin*
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Oakland, CA
I'm investigating my options for dumping local phone service while still remaining part of my building's security system. If I can do that trick I'll be looking into sonic.net most likely.
Patrick, let us know how sonic.net is working out for you please.
I'll keep making updates as I continue to investigate my options.
I so desperately want to dump AT&T like the syphilitic gangrene infested maggot ridden whore that it is.
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Alexandria, VA
Verizon was my landline phone company and AT&T was my long distance carieer for 10 years, and it's been ok so far till I found out AT&T jacked my rate up without telling me anything. So I decided to migrate phone service to Cox cable, which also is my internet and TV cable provider. In other words, bundle it up. Dealing with verizon was relatively painless. AT&T in contrast, was a hell. Clueless foreigners, corky managers, lies, attitudes, time delays, etc.
Cox has been quite alright and helpful so far... except three minor problems.
- Your phone dies when there's service outrage.
- They messed the billing up, and took 3 monthes to get it right. (I got credits for that)
- If you're playing online games, forget Cox, look for other ISPs.
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46 male
Menlo Park, CA
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simchaland says
So far so good! I still seem to be getting my 3mbps on sonic.net DSL without any stalling.
Today I also upped my TMobile cellphone minutes rather than going the Skype route for voice service. There just are no cheap phones for Skype, and apparently no standalone (no PC) adapters at all. I've heard Skype makes its money partly on very high patent royalty fees for its phones.
I had 500 minutes with TMobile for a total of $80/month for 4 shared lines (wife and kids phones). Turns out you really just have to walk in there and ask them to put you on the "Even More Plus" familiy plan which is 1500 minutes for the same price! Well, actually the pricing is different in that it's a different base price and per line fee, but all told with taxes etc it comes out just about the same. The key was I had no contract! It's definitely worthwhile to avoid cellphone contracts.
Now if TMobile is telling the truth and my next bill from them looks good, I'll be happy. My costs will have gone DOWN for three times the DSL speed and three times the cellphone minutes. So long ATT!
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Oakland, CA
seaside says
Yeah, that's why I want to dump AT&T. They are an evil corporation who acts like they are the only game in town, because, well, in order to find other options you really have to look hard. They are a virtual monopoly and they act like it with their abusive business practices.
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Bellingham, WA
I've got a grandfathered Virgin Mobile pre-pay plan I'm happy with. $80/yr minimum, flat-rate 20c/minute, auto-bills when the minutes get low or $20/qtr, whichever comes first. Instead of iPhone I've got an iPod 3GS. Win-win AFAICT, rather pay $80+ year than $80/mo.
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Im moving back to MT zone soon, where I can use my Crickett modem.
$40.00 mos, new area is covered, many areas are not, tho.
I dont know the speed etc, know that I get all 5 bands in bigger areas and I dont dwnld anything.
My little IP/Phone/TV saga.
I read recently that Qwest was bought by CenturyLink, once CenturyTel.
This could NOT hurt Qwest worse than their partnering with DirectTv.
I used CenturyTel a few years in the NW and had no problems with them, a landline where there were no cell towers anywhere. They also billed for DishTv which made things very simple and it was never a clusterfuk.
When I had to get back to Qwest for a short time it was clearly a spell from hell.
The Qwest modem NEVER worked, no one would determine why.
It was Qwest for IP, phone line and Directv. No other choices, at first, until I located Circkett. Then "no line of sight" for Directv signal, abruptly, due to circumstance beyond my control.
It has taken over five months to correct the billing errors, and Ive still not received
my additional refunds. Month after month Im billed for dates/times I never had the service. They received their returned receivers and I kept notes of who signed for them. DirectTv took $200+ out of my Visa acct for 'early cancel fee' despite "no line of sight". My state credit union got that back FOR ME.
It took two full days every month for five months, calling both Qwest and Directv, transferred repeatedly until disconnected, calling back sitting thru the wait times, being assured this was all a big mistake rectified right now! Not. Every month come the bills, late!!, past due!!
But wait...I never had service with you at that time.
It was all cleared up last month during a marathon 3-party conference call redone 4x due to disconnections. Now, another brand new shiney bill from Directv, again. WTF.
And still no final bill from Qwest...it has changed at least 4x.
Once Im fully back in MT zone, my only landline choice is qwest. OMG.
I dont have need for cell service other than Trac-phone. I also avoid getting into 'contracts' with these companies. Im going with basic Qwest connection service only. No Directtv, no bundles, no nuthin.
Ive used the same ATT prepaid phones cards for a decade. Got no prob with using those cards!!...easy to recharge and I know the #s by heart.
I'll use my Crickett modem, and I may go with local TV only.
Anything else I'll watch on the tubes.
I am so sick of dealing with these miserable hybrid 'companies'.
If I decide to get TV....Im stuck with comcast, which will be the First experience I'll have with 'the worst company in america'.
...Im sure it too will be the thrill of a lifetime.
Its hard to fathom why these companies are so totally inefficient, other than they just hope people will pay them.
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Im also going to get the magic-jack modem.
I can get rid of the phone company then as well.
Paring it down to small IP modem bill and small modem phone bill. :)
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46 male
Menlo Park, CA
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Turns out that ATT is screwing lots of people all the time, and if you had their DSL service you might be eligible to get a settlement:
http://www.dslspeedsettlement.com/
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simchaland; "I’m investigating my options for dumping local phone service while still remaining part of my building’s security system."
If your alarm control panel is even remotely new it probably will interface with a cellphone dialer. These are usually called a "cell-backup" because normally they are not the first way the alarm tries to contact the central; station. You will have to pay for the cell service.
I just dropped ATT land line service at the house for no 'phone at all. ATT sucks! One of my work 'phones used ATT, sometimes we would have to redial 4 times to complete a 10 minute conversation! ATT sucks! That office also used COMCAST internet. The company was FORCED to pay for basic cable (TV) service even thought there wasn't any television in the office! COMCAST said that was the ONLY way they provided HS internet! COMCAST sucks too! Where I am now we use ATT dial up for the internet. On a good night the speed will soar up to 49.7kb/sec!
I just got the t-moble service. I paid the $100 to get the price per minute down to a dime but I am telling almost everyone that gets the number, "It is costing me a quarter per minute so if you call have your thoughts collected and don't stutter".
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Saint George, UT
elliemae's website
I cancelled my cell service, left the evil Verizon empire. My cell was for my convenience only - and it didn't work at my house, just 20 miles down the road in the next town. I didn't check voice mail because I could either see who called and return it - or not. I sent out a mass email telling people that I no longer have a cell.
The backlash has been amazing. Friends, who never called me, all of the sudden asking how to get ahold of me in an emergency... My work asked how they would reach me in the event of emergency... But I'm either at home, at work, or wouldn't have answered anyway. It's the perception I think.
How many of us have mistaken someone speaking with us when someone is on their cell phone & we didn't know it? Do I really need to take a call when I'm in the grocery store? I think not - and I think that we've become psychologically dependent upon cellular.