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Do you have a landline phone? If so, whom do you pay for it, an ILEC or a CLEC? And how is it delivered, copper or fiber? Do these differences matter? What does all this terminology mean anyways? And how do you order a "real" landline, whatever that's supposed to be these days?
To answer these questions, and more, I decided to experiment with as many current service offerings as I could. In this blog post, I will comprehensively review the current state of landline phone service, in the United States at large, but with a particular focus on Verizon's service territory, where I ran my experiments. I will review many of the myths and mysteries surrounding available services these days and debunk them.
This blog post is the culmination of independent and firsthand research that I have been doing for the past 18 months into the current state of regulated "POTS" service offerings available to residential and small business customers in Verizon's fiber service territories. I have not received any compensation from the companies reviewed here.
In a span of about one year, I have ordered various "POTS" services from 4 different divisions at 3 different companies, tested 5 types of service, been presubscribed to 3 different long distance providers, gotten free phone service on 4 different occasions, and spent far too much time on the phone with customer support. I have also compared notes with other phreaks in the community on their experiences to fill in gaps. I believe this is the most comprehensive review of "POTS" service offerings in the U.S., particiularly in Verizon's service area, in recent years. I'll comprehensively review every type of service tested (generally from the lens of a typical consumer, but pointing out aspects that phone phreaks may find interesting as well) and offer recommendations for which services to choose (and which ones to avoid).
An Analysis of "POTS over fiber" offerings in the era of copper retirement
What is "fiber" phone service?
Over the past decade, there has been a lot of controversy and confusion about the state of landline phone service in Verizon's service territory. Well-known for its "fiber is the only fix" policy of transitioning copper phone service to fiber en masse in most of the urban areas in its former NYNEX/Bell Atlantic service territory. While fiber offers many advantages, which Verizon will happily tout, there are two main disadvantages of fiber phone service.
Copper vs fiber
First and foremost, fiber does not conduct electricity — or as Dr. Markowitz said best in Murder By Phone (1982), "fiber optics cannot ring a bell". This is crucial in power outages which, despite what Verizon would like to believe, do happen from time to time. Historically, all landlines have been delivered over copper, which conducts electricity. This complete separation of the phone system from mains power allowed phone service to continue operating in mains power outages, since the central office (C.O.) provides backup power, and COs typically have a lot of backup power (see the bottom of the linked page). This is why even in the massive Northeast Blackout of 1965, phone service was largely uninterrupted.
Were a blackout of this magnitude to occur today, we would be far less resilient. Between those who have phone service over fiber with no or inadequate backup power, those with cordless phones, or those with no landline phone service at all, the average person's access to resilient telecommunications facilities is much lower than it was half a century ago. As copper slowly gives way to fiber in many areas, we return to the primitive early era of telephone service, before "common battery" service, with people largely "on their own" when it comes to ensuring their phone service will work in a power outage.
There is, of course, a caveat to fiber phone service. Most fiber service is passive, typically GPON, which means there are no active electronics between you and the C.O. One advantage of this is that, as long as you are able to supply backup power indefinitely (which, while impractical in many cases, is technically possible), your phone service should still work. While this was true with copper service historically, in recent decades, many customers have had their service concentrated on SLC-96s, which basically digitize phone lines in the area and have digital backhaul to the CO. SLCs are notorious for being poorly maintained, with inadequate or even no backup power in an outage. As a result, landline service, in many areas, has become less reliable in the last couple decades or so, even before fiber phone service arrived on the scene. While copper direct to the C.O. is ideal, if you would take fiber phone service over service off a poorly maintained SLC, you wouldn't be the only one.
The second disadvantage is that fiber phone service in many areas is coupled with provisioning service off a packet switch. I'll talk more about this in a bit.
I am not going to discuss the merits of fiber and copper much more than this — that in and of itself would fill another blog post in its entirety. However, this background is useful for understanding the service options available that I reviewed. Verizon, of all the RBOCs (the Baby Bells), has been the most agressive in converting its urban service areas from copper to fiber, which it has branded as "FiOS". I say urban service areas, because that's largely the extent of most FiOS deployments. While it's commonly believed that Verizon does not provide copper service anymore, this is not entirely correct. In fact, FiOS is largely unavailable in most rural areas in Verizon's territory. In these areas, Verizon continues to provide phone service over copper, not because it wants to, but because that's all there is.
As to the commonly held belief that in Verizon's FiOS territories, you can no longer get copper phone service? This is largely correct, unfortunately. Contrary to what is often believed, and indeed has been repeated so much that it is now popular legend, Verizon does not have any obligation to provide phone service over copper, nor does pretty much any phone company. While universal service obligations, such as California's COLR (Carrier of Last Resort), exist to varying extents in some places, these are more about guaranteeing access to service rather than dictating a particular technical bar that this service needs to meet, and certainly mandating copper is not one of them. So no, by law, you are not entitled to a copper phone line.
There are some interesting caveats here. First, Verizon still continues to operate traditional central offices in many areas, even where the copper has been largely decomissioned. For example, I know of an entire central office that, according to Verizon, has both a 5ESS and a DMS-100 in it currently. As far as I know, the only lines remaining on the DMS-100 are the legacy courtesy phones at a nearby university. Any other Verizon phone line in the area is provided over fiber - existing customers were migrated several years ago and new customers get service from an ONT from the get-go. While these switches are still active, you can't get service from them, unless you're grandfathered into a multimillion dollar contract with Verizon (which, I suspect, is the only reason these switches are still operating and not on their way to the junkyard yet).
Types of Switching Equipment
This brings us to another matter, the switching equipment. In the rest of this post, I will refer to two kinds of switching equipment: "traditional" or "TDM" (time division multiplexing) switches, which these days consist largely of the venerable 5ESS and DMS-100 as well as assorted "independent" switches such as EWSD and the GTD-5; and "packet" switches, such as the CS-1500, CS-2000, and other flavorless and largely unimpressive pieces of computer hardware. Superficially, one difference between these categories is "age" — many TDM switches have been in service for 30 or 40 years or more, while packet switches largely serve as their replacements, due to their lower energy consumption, smaller footprint, and IP functionality. A more fundamental difference has to do with the switching fabric: a TDM switch uses time-division multiplexing to switch calls, with dedicated hardware to do so, resulting in extremely low latency and very good call quality. The latency is so low that it's basically impossible to beat this with any packet switching techniques (though in practice, only an astute phone phreak is likely to notice the difference).
While it would be an easy simplification to say that copper phone service goes hand in hand with TDM switches, and fiber phone service with packet switches, this isn't totally true. While this is likely true, as a general trend, there are enough exceptions to this that I would not even be comfortable calling it a rule of thumb. However, it is true that, in Verizon's urban service territories, fiber phone service is generally served by a packet switch. Notice that I said "a packet switch", not "packet switches", plural. That's because, with the transition from copper to fiber, Verizon has also been moving from TDM switches in each neighborhood of a city to a single packet switch serving the entire city. From a business perspective, this makes sense, and follows the same trend of concentration and centralization that can be observed in pretty much all other facets of the industry. Still, it can make some people uncomfortable with the enormous extent of the concentration that exists in many places. For example, the Philadelphia metro area and towns as far as fifty miles away all appeared to be served by the same packet switch (at least, if we choose to associate a single LRN (Location Routing Number) 1:1 to a single switch).
All of my "experiments" in multiple cities in different states were with fiber service from a packet switch (C-15 and C-20 type equipment). While they perform the basic functions that a telephone switch would be expected to do, they are arguably a downgrade from TDM switching equipment in several ways, which I will discuss more in a bit. That being said, in some places, fiber phone service is served by a TDM switch, believe it or not. An example that I have not used personally but have gotten credible information from other phone phreaks on concerns service available in part of Verizon South's service territory where the service comes out of a DMS-100... over fiber. It seems plausible that GR-CORE 303 or some kind of non-IP Layer 2 protocol is being used to make this possible. I don't work for Verizon, and so I can only speculate on the exact technology behind the scenes; however, it's been reported to be fairly faithful to what copper service from a DMS-100 would feel like. The only major noticable difference that we've observed to date is that dial pulsing during a call will be converted to DTMF. A real TDM switch would not do this, since the CDPR (Customer Dial Pulse Receiver, a fancy and confusing name for the DTMF decoder) is not active during a call. To me, this suggests that the ONT is potentially converting the pulses to DTMF during the call, but I don't know that for certain.
That's in the case of "POTS over fiber" to a TDM switch. If it's to a packet switch, as the services I tested were, then pulses are not converted to DTMF, they are interpreted locally. You can pulse dial numbers locally, but digits are not converted to DTMF during a call, which actually mirrors traditional behavior so this could be a bonus depending on your point of view. Pulses aren't actually interpreted by the switch, as when connected to the switch, rather than getting dial tone from the ONT, pulses aren't accepted.
ONTs used for fiber service
Speaking of ONTs, or optical network terminals, let's talk about the one Verizon uses. An ONT is basically a "fiber modem", and is what performs the analog-to-digital conversion for phone service. Of course, they can also be used for providing fiber internet service, such as Verizon's popular "FiOS" offering, but that's not what we're concerned with in this blog post (though it's not entirely irrelevant either, as you will see). The Alcatel-Lucent, now Nokia, 211 series ONT, a slimmer black unit, is the most popular one currently deployed by Verizon. It has two phone jacks, so it can provide up to two phone lines, much like a normal twisted-pair drop has four wires and can provide two lines. What if you need more than two lines? Well, unlike copper, Verizon won't give you another service drop, instead, they have larger ONTs, such as larger white units that can provide 3 to 8 phone lines.
Verizon does not install backup power with these ONTs unless you ask for it (and pay for it). Sadly, there is no requirement for them to provide backup power equipment for you anymore, they have transferred this burden wholly to you. Nowadays, Verizon sells D-cell battery backup units, but I found one of the older rechargable 12V sealed lead acid battery units on eBay and have been using that personally. These are supposed to provide up to 8 hours of backup power. Only the phone service is functional when powered by the battery backup, at least in their default configuration, which can be circumvented with a simple hack.
Verizon uses these ONTs for both regulated and unregulated phone service. A common misconception is that all Verizon fiber phone service is "FiOS Digital Voice". This is false. FiOS Digital Voice (FDV, hereafter) is Verizon's unregulated phone offering typically included in triple-play "packages" that include TV, Internet, and phone service all in a bundled. In these packages, the phone service is $25 flat-rate with a few calling features and inclusive of domestic long-distance. This is not what we will be talking about today. In this post, I will only be reviewing "traditional" phone service offerings, which in this context refers to the regulated service offerings that cost the same as the the copper service did in the service guides and tariffs. Verizon calls this offering "POTS over fiber", which is a bit of a loaded term. Some people would argue that if it's not copper, it's not POTS, and while I see their point, this is the term Verizon uses internally, so I'll be using it as well here.
What is "POTS over fiber"?
Let me repeat that. Fiber phone service is not synonymous with FDV. In Verizon's own words, used when converting copper customers to fiber:
This is not Fios voice service. It is your existing voice service, only provided over fiber instead of copper, at the same price, terms, and conditions. Existing devices that use your current copper voice line(s) such as fax machines, security alarms, and medical monitoring equipment are fully compatible with voice service over fiber. During this transition to fiber, if you experience a service outage, we will repair your service on fiber.
There are a few differences between the two offerings. As I just mentioned, and as Verizon pointed out to its irrate customers, "POTS over fiber" is priced the same as "POTS over copper". By priced the same, I mean you can expect to pay a lot more for it (I'll detail pricing in the ILEC/CLEC section). From a business perspective, the service is essentially identical. From a regulatory perspective, they are also identical. "POTS over fiber" customers have all the typical protections offered by the state's PUC or PSC, should they have an issue that could benefit from their intervention. FDV, on the other hand, is unergulated, and not within the oversight of a PUC/PSC.
While "POTS over fiber" is "regulated" service, it is not necessarily tariffed. In many areas, state PUCs/PCSs have essentially "deregulated" phone service, partially or fully, as they have deemed the service to be subject to competition. If you go look at Verizon's tariffs, you may have a hard time at first. In many states, service has been "detariffed", deemed "competitive" and therefore what was in the tariff in the days of yore is now found in the "service guide". While in practice, this hasn't changed things as much as it could have, it does mean the telco has more leeway. Many services that were formerly in the tariff, and thus the telco was thus legally obliged to provide (subject to the fine print) are now blatantly unavailable. For example, ISDN-BRI service may be in the "service guide", subject to "availability of compatibile facilities", but you can bet that fiber is not a compatible facility and that, not being a tariffed service, Verizon will tell you to go sniff some glue if you want to get it.
While I didn't try ordering BRI service, I did initially try order coin service, specifically a network-controlled coin line since these are ground start lines which require +/- 130 volts for collect and return signals and thus it was a sure bet that Verizon would not be able to provide this service over fiber (Verizon can and does provide COCOT lines over fiber, since these are normal loop start lines with no special physical characteristics). After days of navigating the company phone tree and being tossed around from department to department, I eventually got the email address [email protected] as the point of contact for this service ([email protected] being the appropriate address for COCOT service. However, there was no phone number, and I never got a response from this address. I could have pursued this further by other means but chose not to. After all, payphone service being tariffed, even if I ever got through to the right department, Verizon would, in all likelihood, tell me to go sniff glue.
So, those are the bureaucratic differences between the services which, while not unimportant, are probably less important to most people than the technical ones. First, what's not different between POTS over fiber and FDV? Well, the ONT for one. Verizon uses the same ONT equipment in all of their installations, provided you have up to 2 phone lines. Secondly, at least with service off a packet switch, it seems possible that both regulated "POTS over fiber" and unregulated FDV lines could be on the same switch. I've seen lines of both types with the same LRN. And finally, in the case of packet switches, the transport is almost certainly SIP in both cases, the VoIP protocol we all love and hate. Effectively, with this kind of phone service, the ONT basically acts as an ATA, albeit a very good one with dedicated low-latency fiber transport to the C.O. that is more reliable than anything you'll ever run through your Internet connection.
What is different between the two services? Well, actually still a lot. As I said, "POTS over fiber" still looks and smells like a traditional copper phone line, for the most part. For one, this means you get Equal Access with POTS over fiber, i.e. you can choose your long distance carrier. I have a whole section dedicated to long distance below, but I'll also point out that even if you don't intend to use a long distance service provided by a company other than your local exchange carrier, this is still incredibly useful, particularly for phone phreaks and anyone else that likes routing test calls around the network or through different carriers. For example, even if AT&T isn't your long distance carrier, you can still dial "101-0288-1-NPA-959-XXXX" to reach some of AT&T's "959" test numbers still accessible on certain tandems. You can't do this with FDV. With FDV, your long distance is all packaged with the service, you can't change it, and you don't get Equal Access, so you can't dial Feature Group D CACs (carrier access codes). You won't get anything by dialing 1-700-555-4141, which with POTS over fiber, will play your interLATA carrier's recorded announcement.
There are other subtle differences as well. Regulated services generally have access to an ANAC, typically 959-1114, while FDV lines do not have access to this (and even wholesale lines may not have access to this test line). Thus, whether or not FDV and POTS over fiber are provided out of the same switch or not, there are other differences in the configuration, the "dialplan", if you will, the translations that are accessible to a subscriber. With POTS over fiber, you have access to reasonably most of the stuff you would expect to find on a traditional POTS line. With FDV, you have the ability to make PSTN phone calls through Verizon, and that's about it. I've heard the call quality is still pretty decent, even with FDV, so if you just need something really basic, it may suffice for you, particiularly if you only care about price and nothing else. (However, if you really care about price and nothing else, you may as well just use your own VoIP carrier and pay far less than $25. In my personal opinion, if you are going to pay a ton of money for phone service from the telco, it may as well be worth it.)
You can still reach an operator with Verizon POTS service, by the way. Just dial "0" and wait for an operator to come on the line. You'll pay a hefty price for it (a couple dollars), but you can do it. Not that the operator can do much for you these days that you can't do yourself, namely place a call. Verizon doesn't do collect calls, person-to-person, busy line verify or interrupt, or anything interesting anymore, so reaching an operator is mainly a curiosity, to make sure there's really still somebody at the other end of the line when you dial "0". (Interestingly, FiOS Digital Voice customers seem to have access to the same operator system, so this isn't a POTS over fiber exclusive.)
POTS over fiber also doesn't have any of the "bells and whistles" that FDV does, such as showing who's calling on your Verizon-provided TV service. Traditional copper service wouldn't do that, so like you would expect, POTS over fiber doesn't do that either.
Cautionary Note About FiOS Internet
While Verizon themselves has contradicted itself depending on who I've talked, by and large, they have confirmed that POTS over fiber voice service is not compatible with FiOS Internet service, which automatically converts a user's voice service to FiOS Digital Voice. In other words, you can either get regulated service(s) from Verizon or unregulated service(s), but not both at the same time, on the same ONT, is my understanding. There is no technical reason for this, to my knowledge; it's purely bureaucratic.
In any case, if you want POTS service (over fiber), you can't use Verizon as your ISP, like you used to be able to when it was copper and you could get DSL (and at a much better bundled price!) Now, there's no such bundle for regulated voice service plus Internet, and you can't combine them at all if your service is delivered over fiber. In most cases, this is not a problem since cable Internet has a much greater reach than fiber, typically making fiber Internet a redundant option for most consumers anyways. That said, fiber Internet is generally technically superior to cable options. Personally, I have POTS over fiber service and cable Internet and am happy with this arrangement. It is the most cost effective (fiber Internet is much more expensive than cable), and voice service is where the differentiation matters to me, not on the Internet side. If your priorities are different, then you may need to make a different decision.
AT&T, interestingly, seems to allow its customers to receive regulated voice service over fiber along with fiber Internet service, but the two services must be on separate accounts: one for the regulated service(s) and one for the unregulated service(s).
A Quick Review of Packet Switches
Earlier, I mentioned that I was not impressed with packet switches. Either due to their poor design, or just Verizon's poor execution, the whole experience of being served by a packet switch feels very "not well put together". For example, I found that sometimes the wrong recording would be played on a certain feature, or sometimes the recordings would alternate, really strange stuff like that which a 5ESS or a DMS would never be caught dead doing. Other differences were more with the "personality" of using the system; instead of Pat Fleet as the voice of certain CLASS features, it was some other voice, no doubt less pleasant to listen to. Pulse dialing on the services I used was clearly an afterthought, functional for a few vertical service codes like 67 and 82, but not others, like 60, for example. Call Waiting Caller ID (CWCID) generally failed to work with my CI-7112 Visual Director CPE, suggesting some timings that were off with the way Call Waiting Caller ID was implemented, whether in the ONT or on the packet switch. On a TDM switch, I would very likely not have encountered any of these issues. They would have been set up properly 25, 30, or 40 years ago and likely would have stayed that way until the switch was decomissioned.
That being said, as a phone phreak, I was not impressed with the packet switch, and I notice the minutiae most people don't care about. For the normal person that just wants functional phone service, they are perfectly acceptable. However, if you are accustomed to the behavior of a TDM switch, you will likely notice many bugs in feature implementations or deviations from the way things are "supposed" to work. I'll call out some examples of these throughout the rest of the post.
ILECs and CLECs
Within the past year, I ordered several different services from multiple companies: Verizon, the ILEC in my area; Clear Rate Communications, a CLEC; and Lingo, another CLEC.
In this section, I will review these companies — their offerings, pricing, service quality, and customer service — all the information a consumer would find useful when deciding which company to use as their provider.
What's a CLEC anyways?
First, a bit of terminology. LEC stands for local exchange carrier, basically a phone company. Prior to 1984, in most of the country, Bell operating companies (BOCs) provided service, often with a single BOC in each state (such as New York Telephone) or in a larger geographic area (such as Mountain Bell). After Divestiture, the phone companies were reorganized into 7 "holding" companies, the Regional Bell Operating Companies, or RBOCs. Over the next two decades or so, after many consolidations, acquisitions, mergers, and spinoffs, we are essentially left with 3 RBOCs: AT&T (which, confusingly, is actually the SBC RBOC, which bought AT&T Long Distance in 2006 and then renamed itself AT&T), CenturyLink (in much of the former US West territory), and Verizon (in much of the former NYNEX and Bell Atlantic territory).
In 1996, Clinton signed into law the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which, among other things, allowed for competition in the local exchange business. Competition had existed in the long-distance market for around two decades at this point, thanks to companies like MCI, but if you wanted phone service and you lived in an RBOC's territory, you had no choice but to order from the RBOC itself. Local competition created the concept of CLECs, "competitive" LECs, as opposed to ILECs, the "incumbent" LECs. All RBOCs are ILECs (incumbent independent phone companies outside of former Bell System territory are also ILECs, but they are not RBOCs). CLECs could compete with ILECs by selling local service directly to consumers, using the ILEC's facilities, namely their copper. In many cases, CLECs had their own switches, colocated at the ILEC's CO.
CLECs, like long distance was in the 1980s, were a big business in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Like many things, its heyday has since passed. CLECs are still around, but there are far fewer of them, and they are generally wholesalers these days, meaning CLECs that actually have their own switch in a CO are much rarer now. The big CLECs instead simply get services from the ILEC wholesale and resell it to businesses and residences. This means they don't need to operate their own physical equipment, and they get volume pricing from the ILEC allowing them to do it.
Part of this is probably due to the FCC removing unbundled loop requirements (UNE) in the late 2010s, which previously required ILECs to allow CLECs to use their copper wholesale. Additionally, unlike copper, which ILECs were previously obligated to allow the CLECs to use in that manner, fiber is not subject to this requirement, which means Verizon doesn't have to let anybody use their fiber. A common misinterpretation of this is that CLECs can't provide service over fiber. This is not true — CLECs can (and do) resell Verizon "POTS over fiber" service, wholesale, but it is still technically Verizon service, just sold through a CLEC. What the CLEC can't do is hook their own equipment up their fiber and give you dial tone from their equipment, like they could back in the day with copper. In some areas, where Verizon has literally ripped the copper out, Verizon has even admitted that nothing stops the CLEC from reinstalling their own copper and providing service over that (as if any CLEC would ever do that!).
Services through a CLEC can sometimes be cheaper than service from the ILEC, depending on the kind of service you get. However, most CLEC offerings have very limited or no variety, compared to what's available from the ILEC. While I will offer some pricing here, you should call the appropriate company for updated pricing, as the exact details will vary based on state and area, and will likely increase over time.
Before elaborating on specific service offerings, I want to clarify a few things about CLECs. Some people believe (and some of the reps working at CLECs can sometimes imply) that ordering from a CLEC can bypass the "fiber" requirements for phone service. This is false. Particularly in the case of the major nationwide CLECs, which simply resell the ILEC's service, it is still the ILEC providing the service at the end of the day, and if you live in a fiber area, you are going to get fiber, period. It doesn't matter if you order through a CLEC or not. Nor will ordering from a CLEC get you onto different switching equipment. The only things that are materially different when ordering from a CLEC are the features provided and your long-distance service. I'll elaborate on these below.
Verizon service offerings
Verizon provides voice service through two departments, Residential and Business. I'll discuss the commonalities of Verizon services in general and then residential and business specific stuff individually.
First off, I will admit that I was a bit skeptical of doing business with Verizon in the beginning. Over the years, they have racked up a rather negative reputation, not entirely undeserved, due to their poor handling of copper-to-fiber migrations. I was overall impressed and pleased with the ease of doing business with Verizon. Their customer-support is almost entirely US-based, and unlike AT&T, the only ILEC that rivals them in size, they do not make it difficult to get traditional phone service. While AT&T will send you to a foreign call center where somebody in broken English lies to you and tells you that your only option is some unregulated VoIP offering (if this happens to you, don't waste your time, just escalate to Tier 3), Verizon will happily give you what you want, that is, assuming they can actually give it to you. Just make it clear you're asking for traditional, regulated service, not FDV, and they'll give you what you ask for.
Turnaround times for both residential and business service are relatively quick; you can expect to get new service within about a week from whenever you order it.
Verizon Residential
Verizon's residential offerings are fairly diverse. Unlike AT&T, Verizon still offers measured-rate service, which is cheaper than flat-rate local calling. This is the most cost effective traditional phone service, period. CLECs do not have measured rate packages, so you can only get this directly from Verizon. The price varies by state, but it can vary from roughly $13-$27 before taxes to $27-$45 after taxes. This includes basic local calling, with no features, and no long distance. It's just dial tone, with a minimal local call allowance, as basic as it gets. If you want reliable phone service so that you can call 911 in an emergency or you have reliable service in a power outage (and you have an ONT battery backup, if on fiber!), then this is the service for you.
One interesting quirk of "POTS over fiber" with a packet switch is that, even if you don't pay for any features, you can effectively get functionality akin to a single-use "Call Hold" feature for free. If you flash, you'll get a recall dial tone and can call a second number. If you flash again, it will drop that call and go back to the first, you can't conference them (unless you subscribe to 3-way calling, or it's included in your package). In contrast, on a TDM switch, the first flash would never have done anything. To me, this seems like a loophole present due to the way the ONT is provisioned, and it might possibly be present only with POTS over fiber on a packet switch (instead of a TDM switch).
Verizon sells more fully featured offerings. Their top-of-the-line offering is Freedom Essentials, which is $80.99 before tax and just over $100 after tax. It includes unlimited local and long-distance calling in the U.S., and all the features that you can get on residential lines: caller ID (with name), call waiting (with Call Waiting Caller ID), 3-way calling, call forwarding variable, and voicemail (Call Forwarding Busy/Don't Answer is also available). While these are arguably the more popular features, there are several features that you specifically cannot get from Verizon, including Speed Calling, Distinctive Ring, and any of the "Selective" features (e.g. Call Block). These are all "grandfathered" in most states, though you can get them through a CLEC (keep reading).
Verizon also has a middle tier offering, Regional Essentials, which is Freedom Essentials without the included long-distance. It's not significantly cheaper, at around $60 before tax and over $90 after tax.
Individual calling features can be purchased a la carte with basic measured or flat-rate phone lines. However, they cost a premium, typically $10 to $15 per feature. If you want more than one or two calling features, you would be better off purchasing Freedom or Regional Essentials. The basic service offering can be economical if you don't want any of the frills.
*66 Busy Redial and *69 Last Call Return are always available with any Verizon voice service, including basic 1MRs with no features. However, each usage incurs a 75-cent charge. An interesting "bug" with these features is that even if you don't have Caller ID on your line, *69 will still read back the number of the last caller, whether you answered or not, so if you want to pay 75 cents for Caller ID every now and then and after the fact, you could do it that way. This is not how it's supposed to work, though; on a TDM switch, if you don't have Caller ID, these features wouldn't do that.
Long distance can also be purchased separately from Verizon, but I'll cover that in the "Long Distance" section later on. Personally, my primary phone line is a 1MR (measured rate residential line) with a long-distance plan and no features at all.
Verizon Business
First off, you don't need to own a business to order Verizon Business service. The service is marketed towards businesses, but as an individual, you can order the service yourself. You have the option to put it in your name instead of a business's name, and same with the credit check. You can purchase basic service like with residential, but the pricing is much higher than with residential. You can also choose between contracted and non-contracted pricing. The non-contracted pricing is significantly higher than contracted pricing (almost double)!
So, if you're not a business, why would you order business service? There are two reasons. Some features are only available on the business side. CustoPak is Verizon's "MVP" (small business Centrex-like offering) package, for between 2 and 30 phone lines. This gives you intercom calling between your extensions and possibly features like Call Hold or Call Pickup, though I didn't succeed in ever getting either of these features working on either of the 2 occasions that I tried it, likely due to being served by a packet switch that couldn't support them (if you're served by a TDM switch, this is a more compelling offering).
Verizon has a "package" offering for business service called "Preferred Voice", which provides all the features available (as discussed in residential), as well as CustoPak features like intercom calling if you order at least 2 lines. It's $59 before tax for the first line and $20 each for additional lines, up to 5 lines total. In practice, this works out to about $81 after tax for one line, and around $115 after tax for two lines. The first line includes unlimited long distance as well (and possibly the second one, though I don't think it's supposed to). Note that this pricing is significantly cheaper than the comparable residential offering, which is $101 after tax for a single line. You can save $20 per month simply by ordering business service!
So, what's the catch? The catch is that this offering is only available with a 2-year contract (most contracted business services are only available in 2-year terms). You get 30 days to try the service with full money back guaranteed, and days 31-60, you can cancel and only pay for what you've used so far. After 2 months, if you cancel, the termination fee is 35% of the remainder of the contract. While this can seem punitive, the cost savings compounded over time can make this worth it if you know you'll have the service for a long time and you want the top tier plan that Verizon has to offer. I'll discuss this more at the end of this post when I discuss strategies for choosing a service.
I ordered Preferred Voice service twice, in two different states, and didn't pay a penny for it either time. The first time, I ordered two CustoPak lines with Preferred Voice, and I cancelled the service because some of the features I wanted were not available (such as Call Hold and Call Pickup), likely due to being served out of a packet switch. The second time, I just ordered a single business line, and I cancelled the service on day 30 and switched to a measured-rate line instead, which is still significantly cheaper (though lacking in features and long-distance). One helpful tip is that if this is the first time you are ordering service from Verizon, it may be worth ordering this service, even if you don't intend to keep it. For one, you can try the service out and see if some of the CustoPak features really are available in your area. If not, you can cancel with no penalty within 30 days and pay nothing. Some other Verizon services may incur an installation fee if you don't already have an ONT and fiber wired to your premises, so if you have that installed with business service and cancel within the first month, you can order a different service and not pay anything for installation, which is normally $40. Plus you get free phone service for up to a month, what's not to like about that?
Support
I have been pretty satisfied with Verizon's support and customer service. While they're not perfect (no company is), in general they really do have a commitment to do right by the customer. This surprised me initially, as I had heard many negative things about Verizon and was thus prepared to expect the worst. Instead, I have been pleasantly surprised with the ease of doing business with Verizon and the quality of our interactions. Let me provide a few examples.
Shortly before Thanksgiving last year, I discovered that I could not dial certain DTMF digits on toll-free calls. This was an incredibly bizarre issue, and though I still don't know what the cause was, I'm guessing that there was some kind inband/RFC2833 conversion issue on a SIP gateway somewhere in their toll free tandem trunking. In any case, the day before Thanksgiving, I called Verizon repair service to let them know about this issue. There was a longer wait time than usual (4 hours, which is incredibly rare; typically, they answer within a few minutes), but I was able to speak with an agent that noted my issue. Usually, they try to resolve tickets within a day or so (they work 7 days a week), but he informed me because of the holiday the next day, it could take longer. I don't remember exactly when the issue was resolved, but within a week, the issue had been corrected and any DTMF digits I sent correctly passed through to the far end. Later, I called in to request a service credit for this "disruption". They were happy to oblige, giving me a full pre-tax credit for an interval of about 2 or 3 weeks, which was significantly longer than the actual duration of my issue. It seems that they had not actually resolved the ticket in their system until a week or two later, and they credited me based on how long the ticket was open, which worked out to my advantage. Since pre-tax, my bill was only $12.62 a month at the time (the taxes were actually greater than the pre-tax charges at the time), it was still less than $10, but it was a nice gesture to see.
Here's another example. One day, while speaking an agent, she told me that *66 and *69 were included with my service. I took "included" to mean flat-rate; in reality, it meant that the features were available, but still incurred a per-use charge of 75c each. Since I was experimenting with the service, I ended up using the features 10 or 15 times that month. Imagine my surprise when I saw the bill! Additionally, I had called the operator once to ask if a certain call would be long-distance. Rather than giving me the rate, the operator simply connected me to the number without telling me, and the called party answered, billing me for the call at the operator-assisted rate! Finally, on a separate occasion, I had made a few calls to 411, when testing all the N11 codes, and though I hadn't asked for anything, I had just hung up after hearing the 411 greeting, I had three separate charges for calling 411 on my bill.
Naturally, I called Verizon and talked to the billing department, explaining I had not asked for any directory listings, not asked for an operator-assisted call, and had been told that *66 were *69 were included and "free". In the end, they agreed to dismiss the vast majority of these charges. They dismissed the 411 charges, the operator-assisted charges, and about 70% of the *66/*69 charges. The latter charges in particular were "against procedure" since they explained these were never free, but agreed to dismiss most of them on the basis of what I'd ben told. So instead of having to pay around $15 for all these mishaps combined, I only had to pay $2 or $3.
In both cases, it was a fairly simply matter to have these charges taken off my bill. I didn't have to jump through any special hoops, I got the issues resolved on my first call.
Making changes to your service is usually pretty straightforward. The first time I ordered a 1MR, I initially did not have long-distance on it. At some point, I decided to add it. Within two hours of speaking to the rep, it was active and working on my line! I think this was unusually fast, as sometimes other changes can take a day or two to go through.
For complicated issues that are not what Verizon is accustomed to dealing with, it is more difficult to seek resolution to particular issues. For instance, at one point I discovered that Verizon's ONTs don't seem to generate the CAS for Call Waiting Caller ID properly (at least, assuming it's the ONT generating it). This is a rather obscure technical issue and one that likely requires coordinating with the switching team or some engineering department for resolution, several tiers up from the folks you would normally talk to. Verizon was more than happy to send technicians out, who obviously couldn't do anything about this, and most of the people that I talked to really did try their best to help me seek a resolution to the extent they could. However, Verizon being a large bureaucracy, some of these issues can be painful, as you might expect. So it was with trying to order a coin line, so it is with obscure technical issues like this.
More recently, I discovered the intra-LATA carrier verification code, typically 1-700-4141 or 1-NPA-700-4141, didn't work on my switch (the inter-LATA code, 1-700-555-4141, works as expected). Some of the reps I talked to in "repair" didn't even know what I was talking about, but created a ticket to hopefully pass along to the right folks. In these cases, I knew exactly what was going on and it was a bit painful explaining it, since I knew more than the phone company did here. For the average person that doesn't know more than the phone company, it's unlikely you'll run into these sorts of issues.
Clear Rate
Clear Rate Communications was the first CLEC from which I tried obtaining service. Another phreak had referred me to a specific person at the department, so I called him to see if I could order service. He told me it would take 3 to 10 business days to connect service. I called back the next week multiple times to check on the status of my order. After several contacts, I was told that the order had not been processed, despite nobody from Clear Rate ever communicating this to me. Not off to a good start!
One issue was that they had never gotten my SSN in order to place the number (which most phone companies, along with most utilities these days, now require). Why they hadn't asked for it, I don't know. They then said I could either make a prepayment or do a credit check in order to obtain service. However, if I made a prepayment, the prepayment would not not be applied towards my bill, so I opted to do the credit check instead to avoid wasting money.
After several more days, I still had not heard back, so I called back again to check on the order status. At this point, I was told that the credit check had "failed", whatever that meant. This was highly suspicious, especially given that I had excellent credit, and had never had an issue with any of the other phone services I had ordered recently. Nonetheless, I was now told that prepayment would be the only option. To add insult to injury, I was now told that the prepayment would be applied towards my bill, which directly contradicted what I had been told originally. If I were told that in the first place, I may have very well opted for the prepayment to speed the process up.
At this point, I went ahead and made a $145 prepayment. The monthly service charge was supposed to be in the $65 range, so this was between 2 and 3 months of service.
The following week, I called back to inquire about my order and was told that prepayment was required to continue. I told them that I had already made a prepayment the week prior. The agents then corrected themselves and said that even though I had made the prepayment, the order had never been submitted! It was pretty clear at this point that, internally, Clear Rate was completely disorganized. Furthermore, by this point, I had asked several times to speak with a supervisor, and though I was told every time that a supervisor would call me back (Clear Rate doesn't let you speak to a supervisor), not a single time had a supervisor called me back.
Three weeks in, well beyond 10 business days, I still didn't have service from Clear Rate. I was also very frustrated with Clear Rate's complete lack of professionalism. Despite their continuous failures in handling my order, they never informed me about these issues a single time — I had to keep calling back in every single day, trying to figure out what the current status was and what the latest roadblock might be on their end. Additionally, it seemed every person I spoke with told me something different about the status, sometimes contradicting what other agents had said recently.
As I neared the 4 week point, I decided that due to Clear Rate's failure to provide the service in a timely and responsible manner, it would be more prudent to deal with another CLEC rather than continue going back and forth with Clear Rate like this. I called in and asked to cancel the order, where I was transferred to retention, where I was connected with the rep from whom I had originally ordered the service! Of everyone I had spoken to, he was the only remotely professional rep, truly apologizing for what I had been through as he processed the cancellation. He let me know that I would be refunded within 48 hours. It seemed that the end was near, at least.
Well, it turned out to be just the beginning. After not seeing a refund to my credit card after a couple days, I called Clear Rate back to inquire about the status of the refund. I was then told that the 48 hour timeframe was not correct, and it could actually take up to 6 weeks to process. I asked to speak directly to retention so that I could clarify the timeframe he had provided me at cancellation and reconcile the discrepancy. Incredibly, my request to speak with retention was denied, since my account was now "closed". Multiple agents rudely hung up on me about this! I called back and spoke to numerous agents over a few days and they all told me that refunds would take up to 6 weeks to process.
Well, I waited 6 weeks, and 6 weeks to the day after cancellation, I called back to ask where my refund was. Now, directly contradicting the previous contradiction, I was told by another agent that this was wrong and that it would actually take 3 to 6 months to process the refund! What a scam! I had just given them an interest-free loan!
At this point, I filed an informal complaint with the state's Public Service Commission. Within a week or so, I received a check in the mail from Clear Rate for $145, with no explanation, no apology. This is why I always recommend to my clients that they contact their state's PSC or PUC if they are being mistreated by their phone company.
Although I did get my money back (sans the interest it could have earned in the 8 or 9 weeks I was without it), I wouldn't exactly say it was a "no harm done" ordeal either. Incredibly, when Clear Rate had done a credit check, they had done a hard credit check, not a soft one like they are supposed to. Every other time I have ordered service from any other phone company, or any other utility for that matter, they always do a soft credit check. Hard credit checks are reserved for opening a new line credit. This was incredibly inappropriate and deceptive of Clear Rate. To add insult to injury, they then said I had "failed" the credit check, which was completely unbelievable. The whole experience was very fish and reeked of borderline fradulent behavior to me. Clear Rate is not a company that will play nicely or play by the rules, so you need to watch out!
I did actually briefly end up getting service through Clear Rate. The day after I cancelled, the service started working, so I had a few days of service with them that I never had to pay for. The line came with most of the standard features, though unfortunately I don't remember specifically which ones, for some of the more "niche" ones.
Clear Rate lines are PIC'ed to MCI WorldCom long distance, which I'm told is very good. You get 4,000 minutes per month (more than 66 hours per month, or more than 2 hours per day). MCI doesn't accept new customers, they mostly do business contracts, so if for some reason, you need to have MCI WorldCom long distance, Clear Rate may be the company for you. Otherwise, I would stay far away from them. Though at the time, their pricing was around $45 pre-tax in my area, it's now $99 in pretty much every state, which means you would actually be paying more for service through Clear Rate than if you had ordered from Verizon directly! Additionally, there is a 1 year contract with ~$180 termination fee. Given that price is usually the main motivation for ordering through a CLEC, this leaves virtually no justification for even dealing with this company.
Lingo
Lingo is the other major nationwide reseller of LEC services (so again, Verizon, in my area). After my horrible experience with Clear Rate, I figured the bar was already pretty low and it was unlikely that things could get much worse. Lingo managed to prove me wrong, not just once, but twice.
The first time I ordered service from Lingo was right after the Clear Rate debacle. At the time, I also had a 1MR, and had an issue with the Clear Rate line still showing up on the Verizon orders for the ONT, which led to delays in the Lingo service getting installed. This bit wasn't actually Lingo's fault, it was either Clear Rate's or Verizon's — both of which just pretty much pointed the finger at the other guy. However, eventually that got worked out and I was able to get Lingo service installed on the second port of the ONT.
First, the pricing 411. Lingo offers three plans: bronze, silver, and gold. Bronze is just dial tone, silver includes all the calling features, and gold also includes 1,500 minutes of long distance. Any non-included long distance is 4.95 cents per minute. The silver plan costs $1 more per month than the bronze, and the gold $1 more than the silver. Lingo offers contracted and non-contracted pricing. The contracted pricing is $2 cheaper per month for a 12-month contract. The non-contracted pricing is still technically contracted, on a month to month basis, so you need to provide 30 days' notice of cancellation or you'll get hit with a $200 termination fee.
The monthly pricing itself is fairly transparent from what you're quoted. Unlike service from, say, Verizon, or most phone companies, where the taxes and fees can add $15 or $20 or even more to your bill, with Lingo, the taxes and fees are very small, only a few dollars. This made Lingo very cost-competitive with most of the other offerings, considering what you got for it.
The long distance is through Excel (PIC code 5102), and is absolutely garbage. I would not call even my worst enemy using this long-distance carrier. As such, the "1,500 minutes of included long-distance" is practically worthless, not even worth the $1 more per month for the gold plan to me. However, the first time I ordered Lingo service, the goal was to experiment, so I ordered the gold plan which included everything to try it out.
The features themselves are perhaps the most compelling part of the service. The "standard" features (the ones you can get from Verizon directly) are there, caller ID with name, call waiting, three-way calling, and call forwarding. Voicemail is the only one Lingo charges extra for (but Verizon doesn't on their feature inclusive plans), and was one I didn't want anyways. Additionally, however, you can also get speed calling, call block, and two distinctive ring numbers with Lingo, at no additional charge. At least, on paper you can get them. You'll see what I mean shortly.
In addition to wanting everything, I also asked for Call Forwarding Don't Answer and Call Forward Busy, which I set up to my 1MR.
Once the service was installed, I immediately noticed that there were no calling features present. As in, not a single one. No Caller ID, no call waiting, no three-way calling nothing. The forwarding arrangement wasn't working either. I called Lingo to report this. Though I have very few positive things to say about Lingo, a small positive is that the support folks, while utterly and completely useless, are at least for the most part professional in their interactions. They're not native English speakers, probably in an offshore call center, but they speak like they're trying to be helpful most of the time, even if they can't actually do anything. By this, I mean "support" can't do anything more than open a ticket for "management" to look at, and you can't speak to management by phone. Noticing a trend?
Well, days went by and I continued to call Lingo back. Like Clear Rate, they did not provide me with any updates as to the status of the line, I had to keep calling back for updates. Days turned into weeks. Christmas came and went. Finally, about five weeks after the service had been installed, some of the features started working I forget now, but maybe Caller ID was working and not call waiting, or vice versa the issues were only about half resolves. I continued to call back and "support" continued to put more tickets in to start another cycle of back and forth phone tag within the phone company.
Around this time, my first bill for service with Lingo was coming due, for $12.38. It was unusually low because I had received a month of free service as a promotion, which I thought was a nice surprise at least. At the time, I was optimistic that my issues would get resolved, and so I paid the bill and waited for more updates.
By this point, you can probably see where this going. After 6 weeks from when the service was installed, I still didn't have all my features working properly. At this point, it became very clear that Lingo, like Clear Rate, was another extremely incompetent burueacracy, designed to fail from the inside out. I called and cancelled my service, since at this point, I was very frustrated and fed up with my (lack) of service.
At this point, two things happened. One, a little while later, a $200 "early termination" fee showed up on my account. This I called in and immediately disputed, given the circumstances. Additionally, I requested a refund of the $12.38 which I had paid on good faith that they would get their act together and fix my service. Since they had failed to do so in a timely manner, I wanted my money back.
It ended up taking several months to finally get a check in the mail for this $12.38. I didn't file a PUC/PSC complaint this time around, even though the timeframes provided were similarly infuriating. The $200 bogus termination fee I was able to get dismissed within a couple weeks or so. It didn't happen immediately because the account was not completely "closed" yet, and at Lingo, when the computer tells them the account is in a certain state, they basically refuse to help you. After the $200 fee was eventually dropped, it took a couple more months to get to the point where they actually agreed to have a check sent out and then actually sent it out.
The horror story doesn't stop here. For some reason, I was crazy enough to try to get service from Lingo a second time. Ultimately, it came down to being enticed by a few particular features, literally. Speed calling is one of my favorite features, and it was not a feature that Verizon would provide to me, at any price, with any service, since they've grandfathered it. However, their wholesale contracts with CLECs evidently allow CLECs to offer the feature, or at least Lingo does. I thought perhaps the first fiasco had maybe been a bit of bad luck and if I tried a second time, surely it wouldn't be as bad?
Well, it wasn't. It was actually worse, much worse. The second time around, I ordered service a month prior to the date I wanted it installed and made it clear that I wanted the silver line with all features, including speed calling, distinctive ring, and so forth. My plan was to PIC the line to AT&T long distance, since the first time around, I had seen that their included Excel long distance service wasn't even fit for a dog to take a dump in. I also had a Verizon Business (Preferred Voice) line installed on the same day, so that I could schedule the installation time. With CLECs, you can't schedule the time of an appointment, only the date. Verizon, as the ILEC, will let you choose or provide you with a 2-hour window for any service call.
Both lines were installed on Day 1, but I immediately noticed some issues with my Lingo service. Call waiting was completely missing, and there were no distinctive ring numbers present at all. However, some of the features, and speed calling and call block in particular, did work, which was pretty neat. Still, my order had been screwed up, not just once now, but a second time, so that was pretty frustrating. It had so happened that I had ordered through the same sales rep this time, so the issues may have been correlated, but with such a dysfunctional company, it's hard to pinpoint exactly where the issues lie.
I immediately reported the issues to Lingo, the day the service was installed. When I called to complain about the issue, they told me that my account was closed and not active. This was baloney, of course, though I knew they were referring to the previously cancelled service. Clearly though, I had dial tone on a line through them, so that couldn't be right. It seemed that for some reason, the order had never been "completed" in either Lingo's or Verizon's system, and required a tech visit to get sorted out. It took another 6 weeks to finally have a tech dispatched at a time I could be home for him to make a service call for literally no reason. The challenge here, again, is that the CLEC has to submit the request, and Lingo would do that and just come back with a date where a tech would be stopping by. They wouldn't provide any details as to when, and they wouldn't let me choose either. The first times, I couldn't make the scheduled time and was not about to rearrange my entire schedule to suit the dysfunctional bureaucracy, so the appointment came and went, and Verizon techs came out each time for no reason, resulting in a missed service visit.
A frustrating aspect about this is that I would get an automated phone call before these visits with a special ID to reschedule the visit if needed. However, if I called Verizon to do this, they couldn't even pull it up, since it was a wholesale ticket, not a Verizon ticket. If they tried pulling up the line, it would have the CLEC's information obviously, and since I was not the customer, they wouldn't talk to me about it, for security reasons. I had better luck when calling back my local tech supervisor, since that bypassed the corporate bureaucracy, but even though I explained the issue, there wasn't much she could do about the poorly scheduled visits either. At some point, I even got phone numbers for RCMAC and NTC and other phone numbers the carriers are supposed to call for changes, and though on one occasion, I was able to get some information about the appointment just from the ticket, on others they were more by the book and refused to talk to me at all, since I was not the customer. In my opinion, phone companies that give up sanity for a little security deserve neither. Ugh.
Eventually, after about 6 weeks, a tech was able to make this pointless visit that allowed the order to "complete" in the system. Prior to that, any attempt to have the issue resolved had actually resulted in my line being disconnected and then reconnect about a week later in the same exact broken configuration (same features missing). Even after the order was "completed", the same issues were present. Of course, I let Lingo know, and continued to call back pretty much every day to check on the status of my issues. Around the same time, I had also signed up for my AT&T long distance service, so I asked them to set the PIC and LPIC for the line to 0288 for both inter and intra LATA service.
Well, after about two weeks, there was a little progress. One of the two distinctive ring numbers I was supposed to get was provisioned. The other one was still nowhere to be seen. I immediately called them about that and let them know they hadn't fully fixed the issue. And of course, my call waiting still didn't work.
Since Lingo quotes 15 business days for most changes to take effect (which is, frankly, downright ridiculous, and a clear sign that you should find a different phone company), some issues I waited a while before digging into further. After a couple weeks, Lingo told me that they had failed to apply the PIC change to my account and I needed to call Verizon and have them change it. This was actually incorrect; in fact, I had called Verizon earlier and tried that, and Verizon had confirmed the CLEC, as the customer, needed to submit this change, just like with any feature. Again, the ILEC would not deal with me at all. But now here I was, going back and forth with Lingo, day after day, as each agent told me that it had failed and I needed to call Verizon, even though that was not how it worked. It was incredibly frustrating.
At this point, it was about 10 weeks since the service was supposed to be working, more than 2 months now. Call waiting started working one day, but NOT with call waiting Caller ID, that is, amazingly, they had taken the narrowest possible interpretation of my complaint and not added Call Waiting ID! So back to support to open another support ticket. At this point, some of the issues I had reported had been halfway fixed, others not at all.
A couple weeks later, I confirmed that my inter-LATA PIC had been set to 0288, finally. Since the intra-LATA PIC verification code was broken on my packet switch, I couldn't confirm if they had also set my LPIC correctly or not. According to them when I called, the ticket was still "pending", so their own information was completely unreliable.
Around this time, a $189 bill was coming due for services since the order had been "completed". Well, the order had never been "completed" properly, and I had learned from the first fiasco. I informed Lingo that I refused to pay any charges on the bill and wanted them dismissed completely, since I had not received the service I had ordered yet and was still waiting for it. "Support" opened a billing dispute, and once again, for weeks I heard nothing.
Finally, 3 months came and went. I had finally been able to talk with "billing", who, amazingly, said they could only offer me a $25 credit, since my service was "working". I matter-of-factly informed them that the service I ordered was not working and I had no intention of paying a penny. Later, she came back and said $50 was the best she could do, nothing more than that. I repeated what I had said originally, that I had no intention of paying bogus charges for service I had not received, now a full three months from when I was supposed to have received it.
Eventually, I decided it was time to end the experiment. 3 months and 1 day from when I was supposed to have received the silver line with all features, I still didn't have Call Waiting Caller ID working on my line. Fed up, I called Lingo and cancelled the service. Again, I was told that $200 termination fee would apply which, of course, I could dispute. I simply stated that, as with the $189 bill they had sent (and was now overdue) for service I had not received, I had no intention of paying a termination fee for service I had never received, and certainly would dispute it. As of the time of publishing, this dispute has still not been formally remedied by Lingo. I guess their business is doing so badly they want every dollar they can get, honestly or dishonestly.
Does your head hurt a little from reading this? Mine too... I actually had to endure it.
There are two points I've tried to illustrate here. Once is that CLECs are downright nasty, they prey on consumers that want to save a few bucks and rarely deliver what you ask them to. They have almost no ability to execute. Secondly, CLECs depend on the ILEC to actually set up your service and make changes. CLECs do a bad job at this communication, and you can't just talk to the ILEC to get things sorted. All these issues compound to make CLECs some of the most dysfunctional bureaucracies on the face of the planet.
Long Distance
While most landline users simply use the long distance service offered by their LEC, you can PIC your line to any carrier of your choice. In some cases, you would want to do this, and in others you would not.
There are 4 long-distance carriers that I covered in this post which I'll touch on here: Verizon, MCI WorldCom, Excel, and AT&T.
First off, MCI WorldCom. You can't sign up for it yourself, so unless you order from a CLEC that has a contract with them, Clear Rate, in this case, you won't get it.
I already mentioned that Excel is crap. If you have service from Lingo, the default PIC is Excel and you will certainly need to get another long distance provider, probably AT&T.
AT&T you can get anywhere. Like CLECs, their support is not the best, but it's not anywhere near as horrible. Initially, agents would tell me they could not give me it since I was not in their service area, making it clear they didn't fully understand I wanted long distance service, not local service. As long as you know what you're talking about, keep pushing for it. Chances are, you know more than most of the people you'll ever talk to at these companies.
AT&T offers several long-distance plans from which to choose, most of which have very expensive per-minute pricing. AT&T offers an "unlimited" plan for $34.99 plus tax which offers unlimited nationwide calling. AT&T LEC customers get a $7 discount, but otherwise, it's basically the same service. Contrary to what I was told at one point, it does not seem to include calls to Canada, which honestly was too good to be true. But for an unlimited long-distance plan, if you're a heavy user, it could be a good value. AT&T is known for having a very good long-distance network, the best, according to some phreaks. I think this is slightly more subjective, but it's definitely one of the top choices.
If you are not an AT&T LEC customer, however, be prepared for another very frustrating bureaucratic process. The most annoying aspect is AT&T will send you a Letter of Authorization to sign and return to a third party verifier, which will then notify AT&T. Initially, they mailed it to me, and I never got it. Another agent then told me they could email it to me. About a week later, I finally got the email, signed and returned it. Another week passed and they told me that the previous form was invalid because they had checked the wrong boxes. They needed to send me another LOA. Oh, and they needed to mail it. No, I said, you emailed it the first time, email the second copy. After speaking with a supervisor, he agreed, yes, they could email it. A week later, I finally got a few more copies of LOAs to sign, one of which I signed and sent back. A couple more weeks passed, and again I called AT&T and asked what the status was. Still waiting for the LOA from the third-party verifier.
Eventually, we got past that, and to the point where my account was active but I needed my LEC to PIC my line appropriately. Well, because that line was with a CLEC, the battle was only half over at this point. Actually getting the PIC changed, which would have been trivial with the ILEC, was another month-plus ordeal. All in all, it took about 7 weeks to even get my account opened properly with AT&T for this service, and another month to get the line PIC'ed.
So, yes, you can get AT&T long distance in Verizon territory. However, don't expect it to be "trivial".
Finally, that leaves Verizon. Unlike AT&T, Verizon Long Distance is only offered to Verizon local customers. You can't get it outside of their service territory, or if you have a line from a CLEC that PICs to a non-Verizon service (such as Lingo PIC'ing to Excel). Verizon only offers included unlimited long-distance with their flagship voice offerings, which are $101 after taxes on the residential side and $81 after taxes on the business side. This is significantly more expensive than a 1MR, so you may find it more economical to pay per-minute unless you make a lot of long-distance calls. If you call and try to order long-distance, Verizon will by default try to sell you a plan that costs $12 per month plus 9 cents per minute. Yikes! Instead, ask for the Five Cents Plan. Though some people have said it's grandfathered, it should still be available. The pricing for this plan is $9 per month plus 5 cents per minute. No, that's not a typo. The monthly charge is lower and the per-minute cost is almost half. What's the catch? The catch is there is a minimum spend requirement, $15 per month. If you don't make enough calls to hit that, you'll get hit with a "shortfall charge" to make up the difference. In a way, I don't actually mind this, since the "use it or lose it" aspect of the first $15 makes me feel less guilty about making long-distance calls using the line. I don't know if that's an intentional marketing angle or not, but it works on me!
As far as quality, I have found AT&T Long Distance and Verizon Long Distance to both be very good. They are certainly far better than anything you would get with a VoIP provider. If you make a lot of modem calls, the service is unbeatable. The latency and overall quality of both of these are very good.
Running the math, if you make more than a couple of hours of long distance calls per month, you are better off with the Five Cents plan for sure. However, at that point, you really need to have pretty high usage to make an unlimited Verizon long-distance plan worth it. The exact amount will vary depending on the type of service you have. However, in the best case scenario of a no frills 1MR with no features at all, your bill after taxes will likely only be $45 or $50 per month, including the costs of the long distance plan. You would need to spend at least $30 per month in usage to even make the 2-year contracted business service a cheaper option than paying per-minute. At $3 an hour, this would be 10 hours per month, or 2.5 hours per week.
If you do want certain features on your basic phone line, those charges will add up quickly at almost $15 per feature. If you want more than one feature or have more than moderate long-distance usage, then very quickly you are better off buying an all-inclusive package. This leads me into the last section of this blog, my recommendations for what service I suggest you get.
Recommendations
In case it is not obvious from my lengthy recount of my CLEC ordeals, I absolutely, under no circumstances, recommend that you order service from a CLEC. If somebody does recommend a CLEC to you, turn around and run as fast as you can in the other direction, because that person is either misinformed or has an ulterior motive.
In the past year, both Lingo's and Clear Rate's pricing have gone up to the point where you would pay or not significantly less than the comparable equivalent from Verizon (the ILEC). Additionally, trying to get service through a CLEC will literally make you want to strangle yourself (or somebody, at any rate). I am not joking. I cannot thing of any worse companies that I have ever worked with that are so incompetent and bordering on downright fradulent. They absolutely have no ability to execute. When you have problems (not if, but when), they will not help you, and will make your life miserable. The potential cost savings of a few dollars a month is more than made up for by the hours of your life you will waste every week trying to get these problems fixed, and it will take months to get these issues resolved, if ever. Meanwhile, you'll be treated like crap the entire time. On top of that, there is almost no benefit to getting service through a CLEC; you certainly can't get "more authentic" service from a CLEC.
Verizon, while not perfect, is professional and generally knows how to run a phone company. Their sales and support folks are pretty helpful, and they are one of the better companies I have done business with in recent memory. Whenever I have had issues with my service or needed to make changes, they have more often than not been able to remedy the issue rather quickly, and at no point have I felt disrespected or unvalued as a customer. While some of their offerings do cost more, you can game the system a little bit and customize your service to your needs to get the best pricing. And, compared to AT&T, which is a relatively more expensive RBOC, Verizon doesn't price gouge its POTS customers to nearly the same extent, particularly on the lower end.
TL;DR Always order phone service from your ILEC (Verizon, if you live in Verizon territory). The few possible benefits of ordering service through a CLEC rarely materialize in practice and are usually counteracted by the hassles of using a CLEC.
There are some downsides to this approach. The only intractable downside is that distinctive ring, speed calling, and call block, are simply not available through Verizon. There is no legitimate technical reasons for this, which is very frustrating. I would happily pay a few bucks extra per month for speed calling, which costs them absolutely nothing to provide. It's not like the switch forgot how to do it, and clearly it didn't if I can get it on my CLEC line through the same switch. These are the parts of the Verizon bureaucracy that I dislike. However, when ordering phone service these days, you can't have everything. And as much as I like speed calling, if forced to choose between speed calling and my sanity, I will grit my teeth and then choose the latter.
To summarize my recommendations for the average consumer that simply wants to order phone service at the best possible rate, I'll offer these as a starting point:
First off, if you want multiple phone lines, and you want any features or you want long-distance, your best option is Preferred Voice from Verizon. The $20 per additional line (up to 5) pre-tax is more like $35 post-tax, but that's still a pretty good deal. The only reason I would not recommend doing this is if you will not keep the lines for at least 2 years. If you are going to keep them for at least 2 years, it will likely save you a lot of money. After 2 years, you have the option of renewing your contract (or not), so even if you do terminate in the middle of a contract at some point and pay the 35% remainder penalty, the money you would have saved over the years ($20 to $60 per line per month) would pay for it.
If you want all or most of the features, at least all the ones Verizon is willing to sell you, you are best off ordering a service that includes them all in the price. Your two choices are residential service or business service. Residential is always going to cost more than business for these plans, because residential service is never contracted. If you're going to keep the service for at least 2 years, I would order Preferred Voice service from Verizon Business. For about $80 after taxes, you get all available features and unlimited long distance, which is pretty compelling pricing. If you only need the service temporarily, then you will want to choose Regional Long Distance if you don't plan to make ANY long distance calls and Freedom Essentials if you need long-distance. It will be expensive but you don't really have a better option. Even if, God forbid, you ordered from a CLEC, Clear Rate will not be cheaper, and Lingo's long distance is garbage, so you would need to pay $40 for AT&T, which would actually end up costing more at the end of the day all combined.
If you don't care to pay for most of the features, then you can get a "basic" phone line on the residential side (basic business lines are more expensive), which doesn't include any features by default. You simply add the ones you want a la carte. This is great if you can get by without any features, or perhaps you only need just one, like Caller ID, for example. If you're just getting a phone line for emergencies and 911, for example, this is for you. This will be the cheapest "POTS" service you can get, period. Verizon's POTS pricing is also much better than AT&T's, meaning that Verizon customers can get traditional landline service (albeit potentially over fiber) at potentially much lower rates than their counterparts that live in other parts of the country.
If you need long-distance, you really have two options at this point. If you use fewer than 2 or 3 hours of long-distance per month, you can go with the $12 + 9c per minute plan. I think this is a massive ripoff, but for very minimal usage, it would be the cheapest. Otherwise, I recommend the Five Cents Plan, which is $6 per month + 5c per minute, with a $15 minimum spend per month (which includes the monthly plan fee). As such, the plan pays for itself after three hours per month, less than an hour a week.
From here, you will need to do the math for your own situation. Starting with the charges for a basic line in your state and any features you want (which Verizon will quote you over the phone), calculate what your bill is and subtract is from $80, which is how much a Preferred Voice line is after taxes. Hopefully, this number is positive. If not, you'd be better off with Preferred Voice. From there, subtract $6 (which is how much the Five Cents Plan itself costs), and divide by 3, which is how much an hour of long distance costs with the Five Cents Plan. This is how many hours of long-distance you would need to use per month to make the Preferred Voice plan more economically attractive. You may be surprised by how high this number is! In the extreme case of a state with cheap phone service (like Pennsylvania, where it's only $9.58 per month before taxes, though much more after adding taxes, a long distance plan, and potentially measured rate local calling if you live in a metro area), you could have a $45 price gap that would give you 15 hours of long distance per month, which is almost 4 hours per week. In more expensive states, the price gap may only be $30 or $35, leaving you more like 10 or 12 hours per month. If you add a single calling feature, like Caller ID, that would wipe out the equivalent of 4 or 5 hours of long-distance, and at this point, you may want to start thinking about upgrading to a package that includes features and long-distance.
My two lessons to take away from my experiences can be summed up as follows:
- CLECs (or, as Mike Sandman colorfully called them, "fake phone companies that compete with the real phone company") were known for sucking back in the day, and they still suck every bit as much now (if not more!). Do yourself a favor and order service directly from your ILEC. You wouldn't have saved much money anyways, but you will save yourself a lot of grief. You may also save your sanity.
- "Unlimited" plans are not always cheaper. You can save money by getting a basic phone line and buying everything else a la carte, such as paying per-minute for long-distance. It may feel old-fashioned, but it may actually save you money.
I hope this guide has been helpful, or at the very least, interesting. I have spent far more time researching and experimenting in the bowels of telecom bureaucracy these past twelve months than I care to admit, easily hundreds of hours. I set about this project to get to the bottom of a lot of the FUD (fear, uncertainity, and doubt) that seemed to surround landline services these days, particularly Verizon's, to see what was possible, what wasn't, and what the merits and demerits of CLECs were. My aim here has been to provide consumers with the information they needed to make an informed choice about their regulated telephone service, information which is sorely lacking and rather difficult to come by. I am now personally much more confident in the service offering that I have chosen to stick with, given that I have seen all the alternatives and what they would entail.
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