Bouncing Hedgehog

Posts Tagged ‘Verizon’

I saw a commercial on TV recently,  T-Mobile if I remember correctly, that asked the question “What do you want from your wireless company?” The answer apparently was “cheaper bills than Verizon” or some such. Well, I guess cheaper where wireless plans are concerned is not a bad answer – although “cheap” and “wireless company” in the same sentence is a contradiction in terms.

So I thought long and hard about the question for oh…. at least 1 second and came up with a much better answer:

COVERAGE.

Like many people back in December we got hit by a snowstorm which (at least in Clendenin, West Virginia) practically sent us back to the stone age. Just before midnight on Friday December 18 the cable went out. No biggie – the TV schedule sucked anyway. Within the hour the power and the phone followed suit. And that’s where the real fun began.

Fortunately for us we have a log fire and a reasonable supply of logs which meant that we weren’t totally without heat. It wasn’t great – we could get the den up to about 62F – but it was certainly better than the rest of the house which very quickly dropped to 40F. We always have food and water on hand for emergencies and thanks to a camping gas stove we could at least cook after a fashion.

We also have a small radio (also for emergencies) and so we tuned in to try and find out what was happening. There’s half a dozen local stations so we didn’t think that would be too hard. Boy, were we ever wrong. What we needed to know were details of the power outages (and what steps were being taken to repair the downed lines) and whether our area had even been reported as out and of course what Verizon were up to as regards downed phone lines. With the phone out we couldn’t report the power out. Cellphone coverage where we live (a whole 25 miles from the state capital) is non-existent. Read the rest of this entry »

Running 12 different web sites is a full time occupation and business for me. And like any business it needs to be run efficiently. The trouble is that I can’t get hi-speed Internet in any usable form where I am and I’m only 25 miles from the state capital of WV. My only alternative to dial-up is satellite and that’s no good to me because I need the upload speed (which totally sucks on satellite) not the slightly faster download speed it offers.

“Well, why did you move somewhere where dial-up is your only option?” I hear somebody ask. The answer to which is “I didn’t,” at least so I thought at the time. Before moving to my current location I checked Verizon’s web site to make sure and sure enough it said DSL was available. I even phoned them to make sure. “Yes,” I was told, “DSL is available from that phone number.” Read the rest of this entry »