looking for new home telephone service provider ?

Edwards Finance > Phones

Q. Just moved and am looking for home telephone service that is reliable and inexpensive. Any of you been there and done that recently? Would appreciate your experiences in finding and using alternative home telephone service providers.

A. This depends on where in the world you live. Try asking neighbors who they use. Followers of RSR will know this is not the first time we & others have been screwed by the UK's wonderful telephone line provider - last time they simply deprived us all in this locality of our lines for 11 days & told us to lump it. And at that time the BT engineers with whom we discussed this fiasco were as pissed off about the sod-you attitude of their senior management - to clients & staff alike - as were us clients. So, I must apologise to those who are now being told our numbers nolonger exist. Please contact me on my mobile - UK number 07904 078838 - until this nonsense is over. However, for the moment our broadband connection, which uses one of the lines which now rejects all calls, _is_ still functioning. Can anyone explain that, please? Yet everyone who has provided the complex & difficult lifting & shifting services on which this big moving operation of ours has depended, & the materials we have needed, has worked well, on spec & on schedule. Only that huge outfit which simply has to join up a couple of sets of telephone wires has fallen down on the job. Cable and data services tend not to disconnect services with service orders. In telecom, no matter how many information systems that have been put in place over the decades, part of the business practice has always been to physically disconnect wiring at both the main distribution frame at the phone switch, and at the intermediate frames in your neighborhood. This frees up cabling (seemingly). Culturally, every installer acts like a cowboy, records tend to be so bad, they go find available pairs, take down connections that look dead, and hook it up as best they can to get the service quickly. If they work in an area a long time they can keep the neighborhood happy, but these days a lot of the work is contracted out. So when you put in your order to move or disconnect, those guys had the lines disconnected pronto, and underground wire was probably rapidly re-assigned to some other pending service (expensive and difficult to pull more underground cable). There's also the service order process, which must take it's own sweet time, your area is already booked a week ahead for installer time. It definitely used to be the case that BT retail services had privileged access to Openreach, but in the last couple of years the playing field has been more or less levelled, and BT retail jump through the same hoops as all the other voice and data providers. Still, chinese walls are only so thick, and it's inevitable that BT retail would have made at least as good a job as anyone else in adapting to the new regime.

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