posted on October 11, 2000 01:19:32 PM
AT&T has destroyed communications in Portland, Oregon!
Here in Portland, Oregon, AT&T moved in last year. And when I say "moved in", I mean that they simply bought up everything for sale communication-wise in and around Portland:
U.S. West, which used to be the telephone company for the Portland area and GTE, which used to be the telephone company for the suburbs were purchased by AT&T. Smaller mom & pop telephone companies in the outlying areas were gobbled up too!
Paragon Cable which supplied cable TV to parts of Portland and TCI, which supplied to other parts of the city, plus all of the suburbs and outlying areas were bought out by AT&T.
God, AT&T and the IRS alone know what else they managed to gobble up!
The Mail & Web server in Vancouver, Washington just on the other side of the Columbia River has crapped out more than once. Now it is non-existant. I can't get e-mail and if you try to call out, you pick up more than one telephone line! That means, that as you are trying to talk to someone, the other line "times-out-off-the-hook" and begins to screech! Fun!
Lately, their web server has been so bad that in the evenings, anyone who has them host auction pictures can't get images to pull up. You may well scream at AW when that happens to you on their web server, but you aren't paying for the service!
It's one thing to expect the occasional down-time on an Internet server; such as, eBay or AW or e-snipe ... whatever! But when the company who owns EVERYTHING goes down, you are lucky to be able to communicate at all!
On top of that, now we have to add our Area Code each and every time that we dial a ocal telephone number! Make no mistake: it's every bit as much of a pain as you imagine it would be!
If given the choice in your area for Public Responses to some all-in-one communications service provider set-up coming your way -- vote NO!
P.s. We can get out on the service-side of the Internet to browse because they use a different server.
posted on October 11, 2000 01:59:38 PM
Wow, and I thought Ameritech was bad here in Ohio! They have been under fire lately due to long waits for repairs etc. Some folks have been waiting up to 3-4 weeks to have their lines fixed. There were some lawsuits, and settlements due to the problems.
They just made it necessary for us to dial the area code for local calls here as well. They are "overlaying" our area with another area code because of a shortage of numbers. It's a real pain, as well as confusing, especially for seniors who don't understand or have a hard time hearing the message you get if you forget to dial the area code. Fax machines, autodialers, you name it, it's been a real mess here the last two weeks since they started it.
Of course, those of us using Time Warner Road Runner are wondering what the Time Warner / AOL merger will bring. Ack...
posted on October 11, 2000 02:19:18 PM
I live in Maryland and we have had to use the area code when we dial local calls for a number of years now. It really bothered me when I received a notice saying that we could maintain our old area code, but if we should add another telephone line we would have a different area code for that number. As I recall everyone was upset. I haven't checked into it lately, but I think they backed off of that one.
It irritates me when I remember how Department of Justice said that the break-up of the telephone system would benefit the consumer. I'm still waiting to see the benefits!
