baavgai: (tech)
([personal profile] baavgai Jan. 6th, 2008 02:57 pm)
Verizon has jerked me around on more that one occasion. They seem to feel that all customers, particularly land lines, are things that just exist to be milked. Their annoyance is painfully apparent when such things moo. Their web site, like most corp sites, is virtual reality phone jail, spinning the navigator in circles until the hopefully give up and go away.

Now, our home phone hardware is quirky at best. Add to that a number of basic service complaints and the question has loomed again, do we need a land line? Rather than go from a place of "get rid of the evil buggers", it seemed like a good idea to look at the bills.

Which is how I found out my last bill kind of got lost in the e-mail: "Change effective 12/08/2007: In compliance with FCC rules to safeguard your personal information, Verizon must ask you to sign in to your account (or register) before viewing account details." The result of this is that they never sent me my bill and I never paid it. It's naturally due tomorrow. I reluctantly gave them a credit card number.

Verizon wireless, if anything, treats their paying customers even more like chattel. They have a particularly sleazy practice of renewing and renegotiating contracts even if they preform the most basic services. Better yet, they don't tell the customer when that happens! We had to replace one phone. Not the get new one and auto renew contract deal, just replace busted one. Bing, renewed contract; customer was not told. To add insult to injury, it was renewed for only that phone, on a family plan. Now it is technically impossible to extricate from this company without breaking some contract. More on the shady bastards here.

I'm willing to take the contract breaking financial hit, just to be free of such unscrupulous pricks. The real question is, is there any company I can use that it's also pond scum? I suspect I'll have to choose the type of scum I'm willing to live with. I want to scum that's contract free.

Anyone have any success or horror stories for getting rid of land lines or dealing with telecom twits?

From: [identity profile] zaduzbina.livejournal.com


We gave up verizon wireless-

we have Skype for home
and have a Virgin Mobile- Sprint pay per call phone.

We have never looked back

less lost calls
better service
Skype in is $60 a year (Canadian and US calls- through computer free)

very happy with service for both as we pay alot less for the time we NEVER used when we had Verizon.

From: [identity profile] h3salthea.livejournal.com


Grimm and I chucked the Verizon landline loooong ago.

We just chucked the Verizon cellphn service over the Holiday.

..very pleased with AT&T for the cellphn service thus far...was recommended by The Gents...

We use Comcast for phone service via the cable. Works, cheaper, and works well.

Ask/contact Grimm for more details if you want, he's in charge of that.

From: [identity profile] beldon.livejournal.com


I have my DSL and VoIP with Speakeasy.net. Had them for 7 years (DSL for 7, phone for about 2) and haven't had any issues. They were bought by Best Buy last year, but so far service is still good. They support Windows, Mac and Linux and don't give a wet slap what you use the connection for-- as long as it's not a pr0n site or an IRC server.

From: [identity profile] joannahurley.livejournal.com


If the salesperson "helpfully" told you about a $150 deal on any new phone, that's why they renewed you: those deals are dependent on you renewing for 2 years. You ought to be able to return the phone within either 2 weeks or 30 days, to cancel that; of course, I don't know how long it's been.

We have Sprint, and it's ok. Their customer service is supposed to be getting better, but I don't think I can really recommend them unless you want their network (DMCA)/devices/whatever. My folks have T-Mobile, and I haven't heard any complaints, and if they're using it, that must mean it's cheap. Mom does drop out more frequently than I do, but she's more often driving when she talks (I almost never lose signal, though).

.

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