We are former Verizon customers. They decided that Maine, NH, and Vermont were not profitable enough and sold our portions of the business to a small company called Fairpoint. This purchase was bigger than their entire company beforehand. The billing errors and service quality are so bad that officials from all three states had a joint meeting with the company and told them to clean things up. When I left NH for Florida at the end of October Fairpoint was going to file for reorganizatioin under bankrupcy protection. We haven't read any NH local news so I don't know if it happened.
We only have a landline through them and it has everything blocked except local calling. We use an AT&T prepaid calling card or our cell phones for long distance. Our bill has been OK but there isn't much to foul up. Others have had disasters similar to the Verizon messes described here.
That is *so* brilliant (local calling + the AT&T prepaid calling card)!
I want to cut down on our Verizon landline bill and called them up about it, they told me that I can only get a certain feature....maybe Call Waiting/Call Answer?....for a whole TEN dollars less than I'm paying for my present calling-plan. What's funny is I can remember way back when....not having any special calling-plans and paying per-call for long-dictance. Well, apparently that is no longer possible? The Verizon people told me that I could have a local calling-plan and then I would have NO long-distance access at all

Oooooo, thankyouthanktyouthankyou! I am going to be able to cut my landline bill WAY down now

agnes!
PS - I will never be without a landline, just can't do it, September 11th taught me that lesson (since all the cell-service crashed).