CenturyTel

What is CenturyTel not telling you

I have recently hooked up my CenturyTel phone service and CenturyTel DSL service. If you have never set up service with CenturyTel, you can set it up over the phone, without reading or signing a contract. I asked the question of “how much will my bill be”. The nice woman that I spoke with at CenturyTel told me that my phone service would be $23.40 and my DSL would be $29.95. She also mentions that I will have to pay taxes too. After getting my first CenturyTel bill, I looked it over to find out that I also had to pay $44.00 for someone to turn on a switch at the office. This seemed to be to be pretty unreasonable, I mean I flip switches all day, to turn on and off the lights in my apartment. It doesn't seem like it takes much effort, at the most I can see it taking 5 minutes back at CenturyTel. This would mean that who ever is flipping the hook up switch is making $528 an hour for CenturyTel.

I then found a recurring charge called “Subscriber Line Charge – Inter”, which costs me $6.50 a month. I called CenturyTel to figure out what this is for, and I learned that this is a charge to pay for the phone lines. ATT used to own all of the phone lines and now the individual phone companies need to pay for these phone lines. I can understand that they need to pay for this, however CenturyTel made $80 million Net last quarter, so I find it hard to believe that I should have to pay the Subscriber Line Charge – Inter charge every month for the rest of the time I have the CenturyTel service. When I asked why the consumer needs to pay this fee every month, and it isn't disclosed when you ask over the phone “how much will your bill be”, the CenturyTel lady told me that CenturyTel can't survive as a company without it. I think that the CenturyTel big whigs can maybe cut down to a $2 million dollar home to afford this cost, and show the consumer that CenturyTel is willing to help the consumer out.

You may be asking yourself why don't I switch to a different company, well there is two reasons. The first reason goes back to the fact that CenturyTel catches you into a verbal contract and if I cancel now that I know that I was deceived by CenturyTel, I would have to pay penalty fees. The second reason is that CenturyTel is the only phone company around me. I now live in a small town, and CenturyTel is actually the only Internet service provider. I think that there should be at least two phone companies in every city. I understand in the small town that I currently live in, why there is only one phone company, however I used to live in an area that had 100,000 people, and CenturyTel was the only phone company. To me this sounds a lot like a monopoly, but hey what do I know, I don't own a corporation.

I don't mean to just pick on CenturyTel, I'm sure that all phone companies do these same types of things, but I've only been subjected to CenturyTel. I just what to be one voice in the fight to help control the greedy, corporate America.