As many of you know, I have a long standing animosity towards telephone companies in general. I’ve never found much to reverse my opinion – most telcos are downright slimy, and will pull any number of fast ones on you.<\/p>\n
SBC (Southwestern Bell), however, has hit a new high – er low – er something.<\/p>\n
In Hindsville, AR (479-789), customers who want to access the internet via dialup have exactly zero local access numbers. Even though SBC has their own ISP, there is no number that is a local call. This is because the only place you can call from 479-789 that is local is – 479-789.<\/p>\n
That’s right, every other number is EAC (extended area calling) – not inter-LATA, but intra-LATA – which means the phone company is justified in screwing you in any way they want. And, as it happens, how they want is with something called local+ – a extra $31.95 a month to be able to call Fayetteville – just 30 miles away.<\/p>\n
So, if you want to have a ISP be a local call in Hindsville, you have to pay $31.95 a month. On top of whatever your ISP charges.<\/p>\n
Isn’t capitolism grand?<\/p>\n
S.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As many of you know, I have a long standing animosity towards telephone companies in general. I’ve never found much to reverse my opinion – most telcos are downright slimy, and will pull any number of fast ones on you. SBC (Southwestern Bell), however, has hit a new high – er low – er something. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1120"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1120"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1120\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1120"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1120"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.sheer.us\/weblogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1120"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}