Goodbye AT&T You SUCK

At our 2nd house, we've had AT&T DSL and phone for 4 years. It has steadily gone up in price every year and the service still sucked just as bad as the year before. Three and a half years ago, they raised the price for caller ID to $8/month from an already inflated $6/month. That was practically as much as the phone service itself cost. A little over 2 years ago, they jacked up the cost of DSL by 25%. More increases later, our latest bill for 1.5 Mbps service hit $28/month and with the land line, the total ended up over $43/month.

I gave them a call to see if they had any promotions for existing customers. Nope. Then I asked to cancel the landline and run naked DSL. The customer service rep tried her best to sell a load of bullshit. She said "Oh don't do that. This is what all of us here have - the landline and the DSL." "Well, to do that we'd have to disconnect your DSL and landline and we're not sure if we'd be able to reconnect your DSL to the same circuit." What the f*ck does that mean? Do they have some 5 year old kid pulling and connecting DSL lines for them? She tried to discourage that option. I said "So I'd be better off just canceling all my AT&T services.", to which she replied "No, you're better off leaving everything alone."

I gave AT&T the boot yesterday after we got Comcast 12Mbps service. To replace the landline, I picked up a second Magic Jack. Of course, I'm just trading one evil (AT&T) for another (Comcast), but then paying $35/month to run 1.5Mbps naked DSL would be just stupid - if AT&T would have actually been able to figure out how to connect it in the first place.

AT&T DSL Pricing Going Up

We have Comcast at our main house and AT&T DSL at our other. The price of DSL is going up $5 per month starting this month! That's a 25% increase over what we're paying for 1.5Mbps service. The service is pretty bad as it is but we don't use it that much. No wonder the US has the worst/priciest Internet experience - pretty sad considering we invented the Internet. That's what happens when there's no competition and you allow all the regional bells to merge together. Funny that AT&T announced "free" hotspot access for many of their broadband customers a few weeks before they announced their raising broadband prices. Free my ass.

If you are staying with AT&T, like we are, because there's no cheaper alternative, then hit this link to lock in your current rate for 1 year before you start financing their "free" wifi hotspots.

Bye bye caller ID

We've decided to get rid of caller ID on our landline. We rarely get calls we want to answer at home anyway. The main reason is the cost of the service is going up from about $6/month to over $8/month! With Comcast going all out with their telephone service in our area, one would expect SBC/AT&T to be more competitive. Not only that, but one would have hoped prices would come down when SBC merged with AT&T (and subsequently BellSouth). Theoretically, there should be some economies of scale that would lead to lower prices. Instead they're raising prices for their services. Looks more like an oligopoly to me - fewer competitors and more pricing power for them. No wonder the landline business is dying.

I've since disabled all the caller ID logic in our HA system and all calls just go to voicemail. If people need to reach us, they can call our cellphones. Besides, our Treo 700WX's have built-in voice command and they announce incoming caller names and numbers using the old Microsoft Mary TTS voice. So, we're not missing our landline caller ID announce much. It may be a matter of time before we shut off the landline completely...