Evaluating A New Phone Service Provider
AT&T completed their assimilation of Bellsouth, my home phone service provider for these past 20 years.
My subscriber fees are now increasing. $1.00 a month. Not a big deal but telephone service these days is a commodity and AT&T is still pricing local phone service like they priced their long distance services back in the 1970’s.
I have the AT&T Complete Choice plan and pay additional fees for not listing in the phone directory and privacy director.
With the Complete Choice plan, optional services, Government Mandated charges (taxes) and Surcharges, my subscription phone service is $55 – $56 month. Long distance calls are billed in addition.
I could opt for the $16 month basic service from AT&T, but that includes no caller ID and I have a feeling AT&T would sell my name and number to every tele-marketer that beat a path to their corporate door. Not to mention having to continue paying AT&T surcharges like the $6.50 “FCC Authorized Charge for Network Access”.
With the latest AT&T increase, I decided to look around for other options. Comcast is my business-class ISP provider and it offer similar phone services for $30 per month for 6 months and then increases the fee to $40 thereafter. Vonage is not likely to survive in the long run, Sunrocket has gone belly up, Skype struggled for 2+ days before they solved their “algorithm outage” and Packet8 doesn’t have a great customer service reputation.
The WhichVOIP web site has accumulated user opinions for some of the various VOIP providers. I’ve decided to try out the VoicePulse Local Unlimited +200 service. $15 month (not sure what the Government Mandated charges will be) brings a lot of features (like filters for scraping off tele-marketers and voicemail services) compared to the $56 equivalent features from AT&T. Yes I know that when the power goes out, I won’t get service. So what? Nearly everyone has a cell phone these days. I carry a BlackBerry wherever I go and family members carry Sprint cell phones.
We’ll see how long it takes for delivery of the ATA device and getting the service setup. With a 30 day money back guarantee this is worth a try.
