Help! In AT&T telephone Hell

October 10, 2008 11:34 AM

Help, I'm looking for an option to AT&T residential landline service.

I presently have one residential landline, one business landline (wife's business) and a fax number for the business For some reason AT&T sends us five bills with different due dates. The charges are excessive in my opinion, well over $100/month. There are line maintenance fees for all these lines. Recently I had excessive static in the lines for over a week and had to eventually go on line to set up a service call. Their service is terrible to say the least. Both my wife and I are hearing impaired and it is next to impossible to get a real human on the line and when we could we have gotten no satisfaction in getting either service or getting these bills consolidated into one. I am sick of the run around I get from them. I went on line looking for alternatives and can't seem to find any. I live in Northeastern Connecticut. Does anyone out there have any suggestions for phone service?

posted by malhaley to home & garden (5 comments total)

I run a business from home and gave up on land lines completely. I don't know if this would work for you, but here's what I use:

* Cell phone with a basic plan for receiving calls and for typical outgoing calls.

* Skype for long calls or conference calls (it can call landlines and cell phones).

* Web-based fax service (currently I use Maxemail but there are probably cheaper ones). Faxes arrive as PDF attachments to emails; to send a fax, you send a PDF to the Maxemail service. I use a scanner to create the PDFs from signed contracts and such.

This is working well for me and for well less than $100/month, though I don't send or receive a lot of faxes.
posted by PatoPata at 11:48 AM on October 10, 2008

If you have broadband internet, I recommend Vonage. We've been using them for over 5 years and have had no problems with them--quite the opposite, we love the price, flexibility and features they give us.

Note: I would not choose this if you don't have a cell phone, however. If the power goes out, so does your phone. (When this happens to us, we forward our vonage # to our cell phone using our pdas.)
posted by Kimberly at 3:09 PM on October 10, 2008

No land lines here for the past 18 months. Level of missing it: zero. Don't even use skype or vonnage. Wife and I have cells (mine's a crackberry), laptops, broadband, wifi and that keeps us as connected as we need to be.

Web fax services are useful but I hated eFax. Their software was terrible.

If your wife wants/needs it, you can get a sooper cheap toll-free number at Kall8 with voice mail. We use that and it runs us $2/month. No, really.
posted by trinity8-director at 3:50 PM on October 10, 2008

A former AT&T customer service rep here. Here are my suggestions if you decide to stay with AT&T.

1) Consolidating bills. You will only be able to consolidate your business lines into one bill and your residential lines into one bill. There are legal reasons for this.

2) If you have something called inside wire maintenance, remove this. It is essentially a waste of money. This is not required, it is optional. If there are other fees, they may be mandatory state and federal fees, you'll have to tell me exactly what it says on your bill.

3) Complain to the DPUC. You will get immediate service right away. Also, tell them you are hearing impaired and you can barely get help. They will love that.

4) Call AT&T and ask for the office of the president in Connecticut. You will get helped quickly if you do that.

5) Like others, I don't have a landline anymore. But, if you are doing a lot of business, you may want to keep it.

Good luck!
posted by hazyspring at 4:08 PM on October 10, 2008

We got rid of our landline and switched to a VOIP service, run over our Comcast HSI connection. Comcast isn't a lot of fun to work with, but the connection seems pretty stable. (I have family in N.E. CT who also have Comcast service, and it's decent up there, too. I guess maybe their technical people are better than their customer service people.)

The biggest advantage of VOIP — when done right, anyway — is that you can buy service from whomever you like, without getting too deeply in bed with any one provider. To do it right, IMO anyway, you'd need to buy your own VOIP hardware and not use 'free' hardware (like you'd get from Vonage) that's locked to a particular provider. Then it's really only a matter of signing up with a provider, and putting their information into your VOIP interface.

I get service from a company called Callcentric, and would recommend them pretty unreservedly; you can look over the configuration instructions they have on their website and see if the process looks like more than you want to get into.

Many VOIP interfaces, including the one I have (the Linksys SPA-2102) support two independent phone lines,* so you might not even need that much equipment to do it.

There's some homework involved, but having done it, I think it was worthwhile; analog POTS is dead to me now.

* There are some caveats to this, but basically having two conversations at the same time requires much more bandwidth than one, because of codec and processing-power limitations, but I've never run into problems with it.
posted by Kadin2048 at 7:27 PM on October 10, 2008