Metroliner telephone article 4064

Yep. My DSL service works just fine, my landline 9SAME LINE) phone won't give me a dial tone. Verizon SWEARS this is wiring in my apartment, won't do anything. Excuse me, how on earth is my DSL not affected by bad wiring, but my phone was?

I tried complaining. They don't care. They don't have to - it's a 'compebreastive' market and if I don't like it I can get VOIP or move elsewhere.

Witness my mess with my apartment phone. Or, my parent's house. They're less than 10 miles from NYC, yet can not get DSL. Verizon won't tell them if-when it'll be installed, just 'Try again in 3 months'. I'm pretty sure Verizon's decided NOT to bother with DSL in the area, but they won't fess up, for fear that it'll cause us to go get cable modem (it will). This has been an ongoing thing for about 4 years now. At first, it was 'It'll be installed in 6 months'. Now, they won't even say THAT, just 'call us another time'. The last time we had a problem on their side of the demark, it took 3 WEEKS to get them to come out and fix it.

Of course, their canned answer is "don't like it, get something else". They can hide behind that now.

No kidding.

Oh, forget that. Try getting a leased line installed by a telco now. Oh yeah, you want it to work and be equalized right? Have fun. VOIP is a cute fad, but computer geeks don't understand zilch about reliability, and the hardware is dismally poor anyway. Vonage tried the old dot com trick on their IPO about saying how they might never make money. Heck, they might not be here in 2 years...

The sad thing is the FCC now allows a free for all in telephone, while forcing useless bullpoo onto the public's TV sets. I get to pay for a V chip I don't need or want, I have to get closed captioning, even though I don't need or want it, new TVs have to have a digital tuner to receive so called HDTV channels* that come in poorly by me (the current standard transmits like poo).

It still hasn't happened. I get regular drops, even in NJ. Voice quality on GSM is a joke, too.

The FCC's a political beast and always was. Look at how HDTV evolved - nobody could agree on a picture standard, we 'needed' HDTV, so the FCC just approved every standard, instead...

*The technical quality of TV today's poor anyway - the other day, a local PBS station showed a movie in the letterbox format. Of course, the movie was shot in 4:3, so to make up for the 'missing' space on the sides, they added thick black bars in...