Hanging up on the phone company

Obtaining phone services for our home in Steamboat Springs has been a major source of aggravation over the past three years.

When we first bought our condo in 2002 it was a second home and we were living in Asia. Neither of us were resident in the US and therefore did not have social security numbers. The only thing harder than dealing with the phone company is dealing with the phone company when your situation is out of the ordinary.

Anyway, they decided that as long as I faxed them some identification the could give me service. So I did that and waited three days like they told me. Still no phone service, so I called them. Seems the fax was too dark. Of course it didn't occur to them to call me at the number I had given them and ask me to refax the documents.

After about a week and half the phone was finally connected. Then we discovered we couldn't make any long distance or international calls. This seemed stranged since the local phone company had asked us who we wanted to select as our long distance carrier. This was a big problem, because by this time I was in Mexico and my wife had no way to call me.

It shouldn't have been a problem because we had rented a cell phone from PostNet while we were waiting for the phone to be connected. Unfortunately the cell phone company was in the process of switching over to a digital network and as part of that process was allocating new numbers to the cell phones. Stupidly they hadn't told their customers about this in advance, and by the time PostNet found out they had no way to tell us, because the cell phone they had rented us was no longer working. Can you hear me now Verizon, you idiots!

Anyway, we eventually found out from the local carrier that we needed to pay a $75 security deposit to get long distance service, which we did.

At the time I didn't think too much about what the long distance and international rates would be. So I was shocked a few months later to receive a bill for nearly $400. It seems I was being charged $3 a minute for calls to Australia. Let me put that in perspective. My local carrier's rate on a $4 month long distance plan is 9 cents a minute. So when you go out of business, which you so richly deserve, I'm going to dance on your grave AT&T.

Late last year I decided to change over to a voice over IP service (VOIP). Lingo is not perfect, but the service is certainly no worse than traditional phone companies, and it is phenomenally good value. $19.95 a month and I get unlimited calling to US, Canada and Western Europe and 3 cents a minute to Australia. To make sure you understand how cheap that is, it means my wife can talk to her mother for an hour and it costs $1.80!

And finally, just to make sure I'd never forget how bad they are, Qwest managed to keep billing me for three months after I'd cancelled my service.