By Elliott Brack
Editor and Publisher, GwinnettForum
JUNE 30, 2023 | Help! I’m hurting! I need some help!
We need some help in tele-communications services, and possibly some reader will come to our rescue.
You probably know it, but it is most frustrating dealing with communications companies. My telephone, internet and television services are with American Telephone and Telegraph, which seems to go to great lengths to make it difficult to talk to them.
And once you make a connection to talk (after going through several people), you hope that you can understand the person to which you are connected. Often your contact may be with someone in another country, who may speak English, but often with a thick accent that makes understanding difficult.
Most recently, there has been a new annoyance. Almost on cue, if you can believe it, AT&T is going to improve my service with a faster speed that some guy with a heavy accent has told me so many times recently. I keep telling him that the speed of service I am getting is OK, but he insists that AT&T is going to provide me with a faster service, and I should sign up for a special promotion.
Of course, this faster service (which I don’t need) will be at an increased cost and I can save money by locking in the service for one year at a lower rate, which still translates into a higher cost for the service. That will make it even higher after one year.
So what to do? In frustration, I began to try and find another service that won’t cost so much. Here’s where the thought that we no longer have monopolies comes home to frighten you. While there are other services (Comcast, Verizon, Xfinity and others), they either cost you about the same, or don’t provide services to all areas, or that particular service to all Zip codes.
It’s as if the companies have almost colluded to carve out niches for themselves.
Then someone mentioned that in some parts of the county there are local internet providers, not well-known, but sometimes with almost-as-good services that are managed independently. So we started searching the Internet for these services. They may exist, and some of you may be customers of these services. If you are, let me know. I would like to at least talk to them.
However, spending a morning searching for these independent firms, I was again frustrated. Though perhaps a dozen places on the Internet listed that they provided such service, I could not get the first one to answer when I called. Several asked for me to leave a message. So far, no return calls.
What I suspect is that some entrepreneur decided to go into the local internet business, and found in the long run that they just could not compete with the big boys. They may have closed their business, but failed to pull their listing off the internet. That may be the reason that when I dialed these numbers, many times I was told: “This number is no longer in service.”
So, dear reader, if you know of a local internet provider, let me know. I’m about convinced that I might not pay less, but I might be less frustrated from getting repeated calls, several every day, from an AT&T sub-contractor.
UPDATE: Three minutes after I finished writing this, guess what happened? Yep, it was a call from AT&T offering me (again) a new faster service! Can you imagine?
- Have a comment? Send to: elliott@brack.net
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