Best landline service for SoWal

[Paula]

We have two rental cottages and like to keep a landline in the cottages in case the guests have an emergency (cell phones can be undependendable and sometime the person with the cell phone leaves the cottage, leaving people behind who don't have cell phones). That said, having a phone in the cottages is expensive; we use Century Link and it's about $40/month because we have call blocking outside the area, and also blocking to collect calls (we had one guest accept a collect call last year; they paid back the fees, but it did show us that people can accept collect calls unless they are blocked). We tried to negotiate lower bills with Century Link but that didn't work. So, I'm ready to switch.

We thought about mediacom's special phone rates of about $5.00/month but then decided not to do that because the internet is down a lot in the area, and they said their phones go down as well when the cables are out, so that's not good for dependable phone service for emergencies.

Sooooooo, does anyone have recommendations for dependable but less expensive phone services?

Thanks.

[kurt]

I think it went from Sprint>centutylink>centuytel which may be your only option for a true land line. i know a lot of people use vonage or other phone by internet service and don't worry about cable going out.

[Paula]

Wow, fast reply. Thanks. To use vonage you have to get on the internet, and mediacom (as so many people on this board warn, is unreliable - it went out several times when we were there over NY). Alternatives to mediacom for internet are...? We're giving Mediacom another year because their rates are great but we're open to change.