Take That, Phone Company!

[doronjosama]

So, for the last few years, we haven't had long distance service. Southwestern Bell/SBC/AT&T/whatever they call themselves today charged such ridiculous fees for it and we kept getting our long distance service changed without our explicit permission (we got "slammed" like three times... yeesh), so we opted to simply NOT HAVE IT. The phone companies were always completely baffled by this whenever they tried to call and get us to sign up for it, but we had calling cards, which worked fine. And, with the internet, we don't really have to call that many people long distance. Well, our plain old vanilla phone bill has been creeping up on the dollar-meter over the last two years. Apparently, when you refuse to play the long distance service game, the phone company finds other ways to charge you. And charge us they did. Our monthly phone bill for plain old vanilla local service, with caller ID, an unlisted number (which they listed *anyway*, despite repeated calls to customer service to keep it unlisted), call waiting with caller ID on that (I hate being surprised on the phone), and nothing else was running us about $45-50 a month. When we first got the service, it was about $30 a month.

Our phone service has also been *horrible* this last month, as someone in the building has gotten fresh DSL or something, so often, in the evenings, we'll have our end of phone conversations disrupted by LOUD SCREECHING RHYTHMIC STATIC. The people on the other end of the line can't hear it, only we can. We have been told there is nothing wrong with the lines. Uh, what?

Enough was enough today. When I went in to pay the cable/internet bill, I signed us up for digital phone. Because we already get the high speed internet (essential for business) and we have a digital cable box (essential for sanity, since we so rarely leave the house), we got a huge discount package, so we will get to keep our same phone number and be getting local service, caller ID, call waiting with caller ID, AND unlimited long distance service for only $2 more than we were already paying for the cable/internet. This will also save us about $43-48 per month. The cable guy comes on the tenth to fix everything up for us.

IN YOUR FACE, AT&T.

Comments

[cudjo-dog.livejournal.com]

(please forgive the long reply. I just got off the phone with "tech-support")

When I first got my own place, I signed up for a telephone service. Long distance service was included in the bill. As this was working too well, the phone company had no choice but to change it. One round of mega-corporation shuffling later, and my telephone service was SWB and my long distance was Sprint.

This was still OK, as I didn’t use long distance much, and thus didn’t get a bill too often. Once again, that was a situation the service providers could not tolerate. I think it was about two years ago, when Sprint changed their policy. Now they’d be charging me on the order of $5 per month whether I made any long-distance calls or not. It goes without saying that they could not combine my long distance bill with my cellular bill, despite the presence of the word “Sprint” on both of them.

Don’t get me started on my old ISP. Apparently I’m the only person in the USA who insists on paying as I go via monthly billing, as opposed to just giving them my credit card number.

I see questionable business tactics like this becoming more and more frequent. If this trend continues, eventually mega-corps will just send large men with crowbars to our homes to extract money for potential future services. As near as I can figure it’s some weird backlash to being unable to offer a product or service anyone would actually consider paying for.

Congrats on sticking to the mega-corp. If enough consumers do this, maybe we can turn this tide.