Dean has a post up warning about the risks involved in Voice-over-IP telephone systems. Even with those in mind, though, I’d happily stop using Verizon for my phone service if any other choice was available to me.

Dean mentions that the phone company is required to come out and see what they can do within 24 hours if your phone is out. That doesn’t mean that they have to do anything, though.

A while back, I was having trouble with the extra phone line I use to connect to the internet. Every evening at 7:00pm, it would completely die. At the time, I was getting home from work around 6, so I basically had phone service for one hour a day. I’d call the phone company, they’d tell me that everything was working fine from their end, but that they’d send someone out the next day to check the phone. The phone would come back on sometime in the morning (I was never trying to use it, so I don’t know exactly when), the repair man would show up at the house, and, sure enough, the phone was working fine at the Network Interface Device. Seeing this, he’d let the company know it wasn’t their problem, and they’d charge me a service fee. Seven p.m. would roll around, and we’d repeat the process again.

That went on for a couple of weeks, and the service charges were fairly outrageous. I couldn’t get anyone at Verizon to act like they understood what I was saying. Yes, I knew the phone was working when he came during the day, because it was working for me when I got home from work. When I say “the phone shuts off at 7:00pm”, I meant: “It works before 7:00pm. Showing up at 1:00pm won’t help anything.” No one at Verizon seemed to understand that, though.

Eventually, the problem was resolved. The box at the bottom of the hill had a breaker that was being blown every evening at 7:00pm, for some reason. Every morning, a Verizon employee reset the breaker, which would restore phone service. From what the service people told me when I called to demand that they remove the service charges and the last two weeks of phone service charges from my bill, it wsan’t the repairman who stopped by the house, but some other Verizon employee. This went on for two weeks, and he apparently never thought that maybe he should figure out why the breaker was blowing every day. The resolution came only when the repair man who’d been out at the house a few times happened to be delayed one day and he just happened to appear after 7:00pm.

Dean’s right, of course, that most VoIP services compete on price, not on customer service, but I still have to think that’s a preferable situation to the one I’m in now, where Verizon doesn’t compete on price or customer service, because there’s no one for them to compete with.

A local girl, whose grandfather lived across the road from me when I was growing up, was killed yesterday evening when she was struck by a car. My prayers and condolences go out to her family.