Sure, I’m not a high paid telecom CEO or CFO, but from what I’ve seen happening to the wireline telecom industry over the last few years, you’d have to give me the customers before I’d take them. Here are a few random reasons why I wouldn’t touch the deal with a ten foot pole:

1. Verizon is losing money on these customers now!
2. People are canceling their local wireline phone service at a rate of around 10% per year or higher.
3. Qwest is selling a basic local phone service account for $13.50 per month, with a full blown unlimited local and long distance calling plan for less than $50.00 per month.  The problem with that, is that Frontier would have to make $50 per month in profit, off of each of their customers, for 3 years, just to break even, and that’s not going to happen.
4. VoIP and cell phones are set to completely replace wireline service over the next 10-20 years, so why would you pay for these customers, when you know statistically that they’re going to jump ship in the near future anyway?

There’s a whole bunch of other reasons, but the main point is that this “New Telecom Math” just isn’t going to do anything but put Frontier out of business.

Drop me a line if you know the answer…

Hopefully the move to Cleartel’s online business customer signup only will take care of that mess, since the bad credit costs on the residential customers, who signed up online, is the reason that Cleartel got rid of most of their online agents.

For those of you who are interested, I checked local service business rates with Cleartel this morning, for a customer in Illinois, and the rates were pretty good. Cleartel offered 2 local calling plans to choose from. The firsts was $29.95 per month for unlimited local calling plus 2 phone features. And they offered a second plan that added 2000 minutes of monthly long distance to the service for only an additional $10.00 per month. If you used all the minutes, that would be like getting your long distance service for 2 cents per minute.

If you’re a business customer, and your interested in getting some local service quotes, you might want to get one from Cleartel to see if they can save you some money.

Qwest’s 14 states are Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington and Wyoming. If you don’t have their local service, and still want their unlimited long distance phone service, you can get it for $25.00 per month.

What the new number means is that customers will now have to dial all 10 digits in a telephone number to make a local call. When there was only one area code, there was no need to dial the area code because the local phone companies  knew a call was local because of how it was dialed. 

Now, the only difference between dialing local and dialing long distance will be the preceeding 1 needed for long distance calls. Here is more information about Utah’s New Area Code  , and if you need more, you can check your local phone company’s website or give them a call.

Then, when you call to ask why your service isn’t working, they have the audacity to tell you that you must have called Verizon, not them, because AT&T doesn’t provide service in your area. LOL

I love AT&T, they screw up so much that it makes selling other discount carriers a breeze. Everyone else is cheaper than they are, and has better customer service. Drop me a line about what you think of AT&T.

If you know of any good local service plans that take online orders, drop me a line so that I can add them to the local phone service page.

Thanks,