BellSouth is giving away my new number?

[Shawn]

Good: Basic, local residential telephone service -- $24.95.

Bad: 20 calls a day, starting at 9 AM, from telemarketers -- to a number that is less than a week old and nobody knows. And, I know it's not simply calls to an old telephone number, since they ask for me by name.

This is absolutely pathetic. Anybody have a similar experience?

[Chris]

you register at donotcall.gov yet?

[KLB]

This is often caused by something called war dialing. They aren't actively targeting your number they may be simply sequentially going through phone numbers. Get your phone on the federal do not call list.

[Todd W]

$24.95 is good? WOW! I get local for $10.95 + tax/fees so it's around $16.

I get a TON of calls too and they leave LONG messages! They aren't for me though, they are for random other people which is good and not...

I`m sorry for your pain!!

[KLB]

Vonage can give you unlimited local and long distance for $25 per month plus taxes. They also have a $15 plan that gives 500 minutes per month. All you need is a broadband Internet connection. Best of all when you send an invite via Vonage to others and they sign up you get two free months of service for each person you sign up and they get one free month of service.

If you know enough people you can convince to switch you can have completely free phone service for a really long time.

[Todd W]

Vonage can give you unlimited local and long distance for $25 per month plus taxes. They also have a $15 plan that gives 500 minutes per month. All you need is a broadband Internet connection. Best of all when you send an invite via Vonage to others and they sign up you get two free months of service for each person you sign up and they get one free month of service.

If you know enough people you can convince to switch you can have completely free phone service for a really long time.

I haven't checked into these places how "GOOD" are they? Quality, service uptime, etc?

[moonshield]

I wouldn't put any degree of treachery beyond BellSouth. They are evil I tell you!

Sign up for that national do not call list. It works well.

[KLB]

I haven't checked into these places how "GOOD" are they? Quality, service uptime, etc?

We just got set up this week. So I don't have much experience with them yet. From the phone calls I've made the voice quality can be very good, it all depends upon how much bandwidth you dedicate to voice. We're dedicating 90 kbs to voice. Uptime will depend upon how good your ISP is. If you have lots of outages with your broadband ISP, you will have lots of outages with Vonage. If there is a service outage, you can have your phone calls automatically rerouted to a different phone number. We have set up our account to forwards phone calls to my wife's cell phone in the advent of a service outage.

[g1c9]

There is a lawsuit against vonage, if i recall, because some woman was put on hold forever and couldn't reach 911 when her house was on fire.