our phone setup is getting downright weird
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
Things were so much more simple in the old days.
Today, I'm dealing with five different companies just to get home and mobile service. But in doing so, I've managed to get everything I need and want, and to do it quite cheaply.
First of all, I got a mobile phone at a 7-11. Not only is this a pay-as-you-go, no-contract affair, they don't even know my name. A real drug-dealer phone like in "The Wire". This enabled me to have a phone while I was looking for work and an apartment; a real godsend. Then I went to les.net and got myself a 'permanent' phone number in the Toronto area. Knowing that the gangster phone wasn't going to be for ever, I used the number from les.net as my real phone number and routed that to the gangster phone. When I'm at the office I re-route the number instead to my work address.
Then I went to teksavvy for Internet and home phone services. They provide damn good Internet connectivity at a good rate, and provide Bell's plain old home phone service. Both are offered without a contract locking us in. But Teksavvy charges a strangely high rate for long distance. So I shopped around and found that yak.ca had a reputation for inexpensive long distance and good clarity. So we've switched our long distance service for our home to them.
Now that we have a home phone and a cheap long distance service there, I route "my number" to my home phone when I'm in. As long as I remember to forward the phone number around, I can usually be contacted at very little expense wherever I am. Currently, I've run out of minutes on the gangster phone, so I have les.net route calls to ring me at work, and if that fails, try me home. I could even have it go to Mari's phone on the weekends. Mwahahaha.
Mari has a second-hand mobile phone (thanks to uncle Brent and aunt Anne) and needed service for it. Happily, I discovered that Fido had a steeply discounted deal on at the time. So now she's got a service plan (again, without contract). It seems that unlimited texting and incoming calls have finally come to Canada. About time. What an embarrassment that was!
But long distance calls on Mari's phone are dang pricey. Then I read about Yak's long distance coverage for mobile phones. I gave them a call and it turns out that with Fido they can take over the long distance charges directly. And when we're outside of the home dialling region for her phone, we have a 1-416 number that we can dial for free and make long distance calls through a call-back feature. It's a bit of a chore (and typically means dialling numbers that we read from a piece of paper or other source) but it's about 1/20th the price of normal mobile phone roaming/long-distance charges.
Soon, I'll unlock the gangster phone and switch my handset to the cheapest program that Fido offers. Then I'll do the same trick for long distance. I figure I should have a flexible mobile phone service including long distance that runs me about $20-30 a month.
Now, off to ebay to get an unlocking code for my gangster phone. Yup, this is a weird era in communications....