Cloudship

I am getting really sick of dealing with Verizon. I still have a landline which I want to keep, including the number. At one point my mother had managed to get on a special Verizon freedom plan which included international calling for free. But that ended about 6 months ago when I had to call them and the sales rep who was trying to pose as a service rep tried to s3witch me to a new plan - only apparently =she did something to my old plan and now I get charged for International calls. Fortunately I no longer need to do much international calling anymore, so it is not a huge loss.

Anyways, who do you use for a landline provider, for those who still have them? I am interested in service quality, business practices/billing quality, and cost and service. While I dont do international, I still regularly need to make and receive long distance calls, so that is a factor as well.

blitzen

I use Ooma (for every intent and purpose landline). Never had a problem in the last 4 (?) or so years. Beside the hardware the ommonthly fees are less than $5

Paint Horse

Ooma is VOIP that runs on an Internet connection. It is fundamentally different from a PSTN based landline.

Everyone seems to have no trouble with Ooma, but I did not find it to be reliable. The box keep going offline. So I got rid of it.

I was trying it as a way to replace an AT&T landline I have as the only reason for it is bad cell signal where I am.

As to the AT&T landline. It is rock solid as are most of this type of technology. AT&T is trying to phase these POTS lines out. The local AT&T store informed me that if I got rid of the POTS line, and then changed my mind I could only go back to a VOIP connection using the U-Verse Internet service I have.

Need

Can you actually replace a landline with a different landline provider? I thought usually only 1 provider ran their lines thru a neighborhood and contract with the city or something. I would just port the number to a cell or internet phone provider.

I haven't have landline in 6+ years.

Paint Horse

Yes, theoretically based on the provisions of the 1996 Telecommunications Act. In practice, not that I have seen in years.

Need

I guess if you could get another landline provider to run hundreds of miles of cable to your house! LOL

I don't really care about landline, but in my city, we can't even change broadband provider. There is only 1. The only other options are cell phone internet or satellite internet.

Paint Horse

No need to bury your own cable. The 1996 act forced the ILEC - Incumbent Local Exchange Carriers - the old baby bells such as where AT&T came from - to rent out access to the lines they had installed. The idea was to introduce competition in the last mile - the connection from the local office to the end user. This worked for a short time until the ILECs raised the rental rates so high no one could make any money that way.

Years back, being 34,000 wire feet from the local central office the only Internet connection I could get was a PSTN dialup line that supported just 14 kbps. A company started offering IDSL - an ISDN based form of DSL that goes out about 50,000 feet using rented access to AT&T's lines. This did not last long as AT&T forced them out of business by raising the rental rates.

Cloudship

So who still provides good old POTS service? (another words, copper - not Fiber or VOIP). My big limitations are that I can't get a good wireless signal at home, power goes out frequently enough that I need a way to make calls even with a power outage, forget our cable infrastructure - it is poor and I don't see that being fixed soon, and it is getting to a point with my father that I want 911 access directly - none of this phone operator transfer a call stuff. But the only landline non-voip providers I can find are Verizon and ATT. Anyone else I am not thinking about?

gfunkdave

Your friendly local ILEC (incumbent local exchange carrier) - the phone company. In much of New England it's Verizon but it can also be FairPoint or one or two others probably. They are the only entity legally required to provide landline phone service.

In recent years Verizon and AT&T have been pushing at the boundaries of what constitutes service (since in rural and less dense areas they lose money on it). Hence the switch to fiber (which is good) and wireless (less good), as both are cheaper to operate than copper.

boberonicus

Nobody. There is no provider in this country that can ensure that your call travels end-to-end over a copper wire. And there's also a high likelihood that any call you make outside of your area will at some point will get chopped into little packets and digitally transmitted. But if you only care about how your call is managed locally, then what gfunkdave says is correct.

gfunkdave

Not just any high likelihood. A certainty.

glob99

In the 1970's, phone calls were carried digitally over copper cables between central offices. Lookup T1 cables.

tmiw

My understanding was that they're basically just giving everyone wireless when possible. I doubt they even want to bother spending the money to put in fiber in anywhere even remotely rural.

Cloudship

OK, let me rephrase that as last-mile copper. I don't care where it goes between switches after that, as that is on power back-up and if that goes out there are bigger problems to worry about. I just don't want to have to worry about phone service in a power outage, which we get a lot now.

KCZ

That depends on the cause of the power outage. If it's due to trees falling on local power lines, that's apt to take the phone lines down too and it doesn't matter who your landline provider is. I have Fair Point (northern NH) and never have service interruptions except for the fairly frequent instances of all utility lines lying in a tangle somewhere a few miles from my house.