Last Friday our phone went on the fritz. I called BellSouth to report the problem. They said it would be fixed by MONDAY EVENING-- that was the first problem. I could get no dialtone. I called the line from my cell phone and went straight to voicemail. All this I reported to BellSouth on Friday. Later on Saturday morning, I went to check voicemail on the homeline (that sitll had no dialtone) and there were two messages from BellSouth congratulating me that the line was shown to be working. I got back on the phone with repair and told them that, in fact, the phone line was not working. They indicated that their testing showed that there was a dialtone running to the house and that since we had declined the monthly wiring maintenance agreement (good idea or bad?) they would have to charge us a minimum $85 for the repair visit. I told them that I would think about it. Instead I went outside and checked the dialtone myself. There was none at the box outside the house. I called back and got yet another service guy on the phone. He checked on our service and told me that in fact it was clearly showing no service to the house. I told him that two other service reps had told me undeniably that there was no problem running to the house. He said he wasn't sure why they told me that.... Naturally, I think they just wanted to extract $85 or more from me. Within the hour, our phone line was working fine. BEWARE of the phone company. Do those reps earn commissions?
Yeah, that's tempting but we both use the land phone line for business and voicemail on mobile phones is so unreliable. I've had instances where messages were delivered 3-4 days late. That won't do for anything... but business calls in particular.
I have the lovely GRANDE COMMUNICATIONS as my service. SBC isn't even offered out here. I plan on switching to Time Warner phone service when it reaches my hood in June.
I don't use TW, because it is far more expensive than Broadvoice. I'm saving so much money going away from SWB and just how often does cable go out? My cable hadn't gone out for more than a few minutes in years. VoIP is worth it. Just not TW. Shop around.
I've lived in this house for 3 years and the cable has never gone out on it's own, only two or three times because of a quick storm related power outage.
DIdn't you start a thread about this a couple of months ago. I think I looked into it and Broadvoice was not available in my area. As Refman indicated, I am concerned about cable outages. I'm out in the country and we seem to get them. Also, TW only offers once Voicemailbox per account and we need to maintain separate voicemail accounts. You'd think RR could upgrade that....
