Anyone who has delt with Frontier will tell you that they are a very bad phone company. They take advantage of their monopoly position by charging lots of money and providing terrible customer service.
A few weeks ago we bought new cordless phones for the house. We thought it would be a good idea to add Caller-ID since the new phones display it. Heather called Frontier and added it today. They want to charge us $11 to activate it and $7.50/month for the service. That seemed a little shoking so I started looking at options.
Vonage provides Caller-ID with their basic service at $14.99/month. That sounds great, but we have to keep the DSL line so we can host our weblog and email server. I called back to see if Frontier would provide a "Naked DSL" line. They do! But they cut the bandwidth back from 2M/256k to 1M/128k. Ouch! I'm not sure I can do that.
- Option 1:
- Frontier Phone ($40) + Frontier DSL ($36) + Visi ISP ($20) = $96
- Option 2:
- Frontier DSL ($36) + Visi ISP ($20) + Vonage ($15) = $71
Hmm, is twice the bandwidth worth $25?
Switched to Vonage for the business in March, they finally transfered my number last week! The service is very good (aside from taking 7 months to transfer my number) and I think it is better than our Verizon landline. We have 6 Mbps cable service from Comcast, so lag is not an issue. Of course Verizon just ran fiber optic by our house last month, so who knows what is next?