On a regular basis, the happy-peppy folk from Comcast contact us to say, "Hey, you use our Cable TV and Internet Broadband services — why not go for a triple-play and use our VOIP phone services, too?"
And my answer has always been, "Hey, our cable and/or internet have intermittent problems, but our US West Qwest CenturyLink POTS phone service is always there, solid and stable."
(And, yes, we want a land line. We live in a mobile phone pit — indeed, we got a Verizon femtocell to books mobile connections, which connected to the outer world, ironically, through our broadband. And I like having a phone connection that's not power-dependent.)
So for the past few months we've been having occasional phone problems — partial rings, rings that don't connect when we pick up, etc. I had thought that it was a problem with our cordless phone system. Margie thought it might be a phone line problem, maybe associated with rain storms.
And then, Thursday, we had a major, major rainstorm, and I got home from my business trip (delayed an hour by DIA being closed), and found Margie on her mobile with CenturyLink, because our phone service went completely out, though apparently the line was showing as busy. (Thus also confirming that her diagnosis of the problem was better than mine.)
The CenturyLink folk, in turn, informed us that it would be a week before we could get someone out to even look at the problem. A week without landline service. Which is what we bother dealing with CenturyLink for.
So one of their techs will be out on Thursday. And I strongly suspect it will take a subsequent trip to resolve the problem, at least. All of which, to be perfectly honest, makes me think that Comcast's VOIP service will be getting a much harder look next time they contact us with a possible deal.
On the bright side, not having a land line is cutting down on a lot of extraneous phone calls for political polls or touting one candidate or another, or for hail damage inspections / repairs. So maybe CenturyLink has done us a service …
