Unbelieveably, Bellsouth managed to screw up my phone order one more time. I was promised that as of 6 PM today, a message would play on my old number directing callers to my new number.
A call was placed at 6:01 PM and then twenty minutes later. No joy.
I can’t begin to express how mad I am at Bellsouth right now. The old number is on all the resumes I sent out. What if someone calls with a job offer and can’t find me? What if I miss out on a job?
I decided yesterday that Bellsouth just doesn’t deserve my business anymore. I’m shopping around for a VoIP provider which:
a) serves this area with local numbers, and
b) offers Local Number Portability, because I want to be able to take my number with me if their service sucks, too.
I don’t know how Bellsouth went so fast from earning my admiration to earning my scorn. It’s truly unbelievable. If there’s ever been a time to cut the landline, this surely is it.
I thought BellSouth already had local number portability? Why couldn’t they move your number so you didn’t have to change at all? Or is Garner somehow in a different region from Raleigh?
-=jpp=-
You must have developed that admiration for BS quite some time ago. In the years that I’ve had to deal with them, they’ve had a “we’ll service no line before its time” attitude. They would even screw up our T-1 leased line from time-to-time, and we had to remind them of how it was provisioned. If that doesn’t qualify as incompetent, I don’t know what does….
If you want to get the attention of the local monopoly, vote with your money. Go VoIP, go cell phone, but don’t go with a land line. When they lose enough customers, they’ll get a clue (or they’ll go out of business).
You can take your number to your cellphone provider. You can take your number to Asia with a voice-over-IP account. But if you move 30 miles from one rate center to another, you get a new number. Don’t ask me why, that’s the way the phone company does it.
Now, if I’d moved farther north into Sprint territory, chances are I could have kept my old number. That’s because it’s from one company to another. How crazy is that?
I’ve had good experience with them and their T1’s. Is this voice or data?
I don’t think they know data worth a darn, and couldn’t run an ISP to save their life. But they’ve got some experience with voice circuits.
The circuit in question was a data line. It would work fine for months, then suddenly, no Internet connection. A quick check of the router showed that the circuit was down, and we called BS to tell them about it (they rarely caught it on their own). They would fix the problem, but our circuit wouldn’t come back up. Seems that there was something out-of-the-ordinary about how this T1 line was provisioned, and they couldn’t or wouldn’t log the details in their records. After this happened for the second time, we wrote down the settings and made sure to tell BS what it needed whenever the line went down.
I no longer work for this company, so I don’t know if the mysterious outages ever went away.