Consolidated Communications

My landline phone went out this morning (November 26th) Cell phones have never worked in my town or in the nearby town so I had to use the Internet (which comes from the same company as my landline phone: Consolidated Communications) to contact relatives in other states so they can call the phone company and tell them about my outage. Not too long after the landline phone went out the Internet from CCI also went very slow and I have to use my back-up Satellite Internet to go online (we are only keeping the back-up until our contract is over.)

I got an e-mail from my relative saying that Consolidated Communications will have a technician come fix my phone and Internet on December 2nd!!!!!!!!!!!!!! That’s 6 days without phone or good Internet. Since we can’t use cell phones that means 6 full days with no real reliable way to contact anyone – including 9-1-1 if an emergency comes up. 

This is not the first, second or even third time that this has happened with Consolidated Communications. The last time was on Memorial Day weekend and I had to wait days then too. I would use another phone company, but there’s a monopoly and only Consolidated Communications is in my area (after they bought it from the old phone company.) 

I think it’s time I get the State and Federal Communications officials involved since Consolidated Communications doesn’t seem to take these outages seriously.