How do you get a telephone hooked up to your house? Say you don’t have a cell phone…and you don’t know anyone…do you go to the nearest payphone and call the phone company and have someone come to install a phone?
Can anyone run down the basic cost of having a landline telephone? I want the bare minimum…no caller ID? How much is a base cost? Do you need a credit check for a phone? This is in California BTW.
I’ve gone to a payphone to call the phone company several times. Once was when my landline stopped working. It’s better to call before you move in since it takes a couple of days to get set up.
It’s been a while, but I think the setup is probably around $40-50. The lowest charges vary. You can get very little frills on your phone. Maybe you can qualify for Lifeline service. Ask when you sign up.
Have you tried plugging in a phone yet?
I recall this problem when I moved to Idaho 3 years ago. I plugged in the phone ( I was curiuous), picked it up, and it rang. I was instantly connected to a Verizon employee, who said my line would be “connected” within a few hours. It was working 10 minutes later. No technician needed to come to my apartment.
I also wanted to get cable TV hooked up. That was rather difficult as I didn’t know the name of the cable company, and they were not listed in the Yellow Pages under ANYTHING TV related. I finally asked my landlord one day… I should have done that to begin with! (It was Adelphia, I never heard of them before so how was I to know?
Anyway, try plugging a phone, and see what happens.
Many telephone companies now have websites thru which you can request activations and other service requests.
That’s exactly what I did when I moved into my first apartment back in 1992, when cell phones weren’t nearly as common as they are today. I went to the grocery store, where I had to do some shopping anyway, looked up the number for the local Bell company in the phone book, and called from the public phone. They took my address and apartment number, told me what my number was going to be and when it would be activated, and lo and behold, I got a dial tone and a monthly bill.
I just hooked up a new line with SBC for no activation fee and it runs about $25 a month for basic service, no add-ons. About half of that is state and local taxes, and other ‘fees’ and $12.95 is the actual SBC service fee, so I am sure states vary. A guy came out to the house but didn’t have to be let in, he did whatever he had to do while I was at work. As long as they can access your line I don’t think they need you there.
I don’t know if they did a credit check or not, but I have never heard of anyone getting turned down for phone service.
To save money, you may want to do as I did, and tell the phone company you do not want a long distance carrier. It cut the approx. $5.00 minimum charge off my bill. I buy the 3.5cent a minute calling cards that you can add time to as needed. I have Verizon, and live on the east coast.
Big Tom has great advice. Cutting my long distance only saved me about $2.60/month, but it’s not nothing. My monthly landline bill was about $24 after all the taxes and fees (in Oregon).
If you have never had an account with the company before or you have no credit, they may require an $80 deposit to get you started. After you pay on time for a few months, you get the money back as a credit to your account.
You can’t just assume that, though. I rarely used long distance, and I noticed that my phone company (their name rhymed with Pouthwestern Pell) was charging me $5 a month just for having long distance, so I asked them to cancel it, leaving me with no long distance carrier selected.
And the next month, they charged me $10 for NOT having a carrier selected. Apparently, it somehow costs them more to do less for me. So, I called another phone company and stopped giving my business to Pouthwestern. Hell with that noise.