The Verdict: Landline Telephone

It's kinda of anti-climactic, but we are going with AT&T U-Verse for our landline telephone. This is partially because we don't have much of a choice -- AT&T requires that you subscribe to at least two of the U-Verse packages to maintain service. Since we want the Internet and don't want the television, we have to maintain the phone service to keep subscribing.

There apparently is not concept of "dry loop" U-Verse. With regular DSL, you can subscribe without any ancillary phone service, and pay an extra $10 per month for this, but AT&T chose not to carry this ability over to U-Verse.

Luckily, we actually like the phone service so it's not much of an issue. The main pluses with U-Verse's phone is the internet-enabled management of the line, call logs, and voicemail messages, as well as unlimited long distance. I noted before the downside of touch tones not working all the time, but this is a relatively minor issue, albeit annoying -- and supposedly AT&T considers it a bug (they should!) and is trying to fix it.

Anyway, that's that. U-Verse for internet and phone, and Sunflower Broadband for television....or is it? This trial has been around a month. While I have gotten good ideas about each service's features and reliability, the fact is, 1 month is too short to figure everything out.

How is U-Verse's long term reliability? What about customer service consistency? We will continue to re-evaluate our service providers based on their own performance as well as new offers and changes from competitors. I plan to keep this blog going, as a resource for Lawrence, Kansas broadband users, as well as as a resource for the increasing number of visitors from outside Lawrence.