Monday, February 23, 2009

Totally Wireless at Home-Oh No!

We ran two stories over the last several weeks concerning the move to either being totally wireless at home, or other alternatives to cutting your home land line. Well, we got to experience life with wireless-only ourselves this past weekend when a sloppy telephone company technician somehow disconnected our home phone line at the local wire panel up the street.

Here we were, recommending that users keep at least a bare-bones land line active at home, mostly because of the reliability of wired phone connections. The fact that we needed to "schedule" a repair (which, fortunately only took 24 hours), and convince the repair agent that we didn't cause the problem, certainly bears out that no phone choice is 100% reliable.

We were lucky. Callers to our home phone are automatically forwarded to our cell if we don't answer. Also, the break in the line wasn't enough to disconnect our DSL connection to the Internet. We could have really been up you-know-what creek without a paddle. But it underscores the need for a home communications backup no matter what your connection is to the outside world.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

You were very lucky. Last summer Verizon while trimming trees back from around the lines accidentally clipped the line that went from the pole to my house. This happened on a Friday and it wasn't till the fallowing Wednesday that they finally fixed it. On top of that they tried to charge me $55.00 even though the copy of the slip they left clearly stated that the issue was their fault. I guess no matter how much you try there is no guaranteed backup.