As we wound down our snow birding experience in Florida back in April we published the story:

'CUSTOMER "SERVICE" AT CENTURY LINK

Now there's a quaint concept'

...and invited you to stay tuned.  Here's how that played out:

The folks at this, Mansfield's latest version of a telephone company, refused to fix the problem they created by turning off my DSL internet service rather than putting it on vacation status during our Florida winter vacation as they had agreed to do.

We did everything short of filing a formal complaint with the state's public utility authorities, all to no avail.

We then fired Century Link.  Period.

Not only was our DSL internet service gone due to their incompetence, we terminated their local phone service too.

My Verizon cell phone is taking up that telephone slack quite nicely.

I also tested a gadget Verizon calls a Jetpack (above).  It is about the size of a small cell phone and captures the local phone signal with its own, discrete telephone number.  It shows a fairly consistent two bars of signal strength at my rural home in heavily wooded hills.  Some of you may know this as an internet Hotspot.

It was a little ragged at first with repeated disconnects but now, with more than a month's experience it is performing quite nicely.  Mostly it flashes a green signal indicating 4G service but occasionally drops back to 3G strength.  I do not notice any difference in performance and regard it as quite similar to my DSL performance experience.

While I run it mostly on its own AC power adapter it does have an internal battery and seems like it may run easily between an hour and two hours and recharges in a reasonable period of time.

When I made the change I already was paying for cell phone service from Verizon in addition to local phone service from Century Link (about $50 monthly) and their DSL internet service (about $25 monthly).  Now, I am paying Verizon (about $50 monthly) for their Jetpack, internet service and saving the $25 monthly I was paying for DSL.

Another big advantage to this set-up is the Jetpack is portable service.  It will travel with me to Florida, or anywhere else Verizon has service, and eliminate the cost--and often inconvenience--of securing internet service in my travels.

Yet another advantage is Verizon has a local, Bellville office with superlative customer service AND we have a good connection with a Verizon shop in Vero Beach, recently purchased by folks from Utica, OH.

We announce "Go Bucks" whenever we enter that store and promptly are rewarded with an O-H-I-O cheer.

In the process of this transition we also successfully tested an Alltel gadget that plugs into a USB port on the laptop.  It performed nicely because my home is conveniently located between two of their rural towers.

We stayed with Verizon because we had three consecutive failures with Alltel's customer service while we were in the process of trying to become their customer.

I shuddered to think what might happen once we signed a formal agreement with that outfit.