Cutting the last tie with Cincinnati Bell

Someday, someday.

For decades, I've hoped that maybe someday I wouldn't have to use Cincinnati Bell - our local phone monopoly long known for dreadfully bad service. Well, someday is here - at long last!

Cincinnati Bell has long controlled all local landline phone service - lock, stock, and sinker. They are the phone company in parts of 3 states. Cincinnati Bellyache has amassed a long list of woes - the least of which may be their high bills for home phone service and frequent rate hikes that are rubber-stamped by regulators.

In the '80s, Cincinnati Bell was found to be conspiring with corrupt right-wing local politicians and police to wiretap phone conversations in search of "communist" activity. (60 Minutes did a piece on this scandal.) This was around the same time I discovered that phone and modem connections would just go dead. It was obvious I was being wiretapped ever since I was old enough to shave, because my connections with computer bulletin boards would occasionally go dead if I made a controversial posting.

Cincinnati Bell refused to do anything about the harassing phone calls from schoolmates I experienced for years and years - forcing me to change my number repeatedly, which incurred extra fees. Although it was unlisted, the culprits somehow found my new number each time. Cincinnati Bell also would not crack down on collection agencies who repeatedly called me and asked for people who I didn't even know. This forced me to drop my landline and get a cell phone - from a different provider.

My landline once went dead because the line in front of my apartment building broke after Cincinnati Bell allowed the sheathing to rot. When I informed them of this, it took almost a week for them to repair it - leaving me without phone access all the while. Cincinnati Bell's pay phones were often inoperable, and would frequently emit an error message while failing to refund your money. This phone giant also charged Kentucky customers more than Ohio customers for long-distance calls - and calls even within the area were sometimes considered long-distance. When far-right Ohio lawmakers passed a law to let phone companies raise rates without approval from regulators, Cincinnati Bell was of course the first company to take advantage of it.

Cincinnati Bell began forcing my old dialup ISP to strictly limit users' online time. This prompted me to switch from dialup to high-speed. I had planned on using my old dialup ISP's high-speed service, but they had just pulled this service out of the area because Cincinnati Bell made them pay too much to use the local phone system. Cincinnati Bell's anticompetitive practice worked: I had no choice but to get Zoomtown - Cincinnati Bell's high-speed ISP - because I could not get Internet from the cable company, for my apartment has no place to put a cable. This was another effective monopoly Cincinnati Bell had. Meanwhile, Cincinnati Bell refused to extend high-speed service to some areas where they had a phone monopoly. I call it an unimproved monopoly: They had been granted a monopoly but refused to provide a service that came with it.

I had a whole new set of problems with Zoomtown. My Zoomtown connection would occasionally go dead for hours at a time, and at least once, it went dead for days. Whenever I had to call their customer service line, they sometimes put me on hold for an hour - which ran up my cell phone minutes, costing me $15 each time. Then they provided ineffective help. After one such service call, my connection became intolerably slow. It was slower than dialup. I made numerous service requests for them to fix it, but it wasn't fixed for 2 years. While this was going on, their website began telling folks to buy their much costlier FiOptics service if they wanted high-speed access. Uh, wasn't high-speed supposed to be the reason Zoomtown exists? Also, FiOptics wasn't even available in all the areas that had Zoomtown!

Websites were occasionally blocked for hours at a time. I know this, because these sites came up fine if I went through a proxy server. At first I thought it was because Zoomtown disliked their political content, but now I think it was because Zoomtown just couldn't handle too many users using these sites, so they restricted access to them - thus violating 'Net neutrality rules.

In the past week, a new problem emerged. Zoomtown began blocking a particular website - not just for hours, but for days. This website was previously accessible through Zoomtown. Access to it still hadn't returned today. After Zoomtown blocked it, I could still use a proxy to access that site's opening page, but the rest of the site wasn't equipped to be used with proxies. I have no doubt whatsoever that Zoomtown is blocking it because of content - even though the content is not illegal.

That was the final straw.

Unlike 6 years ago when I got Zoomtown, there's now another high-speed ISP offering access in my area. So now I've switched to them - because of Zoomtown's censorship. Since the new ISP is wireless, it doesn't use Cincinnati Bell's antiquated phone system. And the website blocked by Zoomtown comes up just fine with this new ISP. Plus, my Internet is now considerably faster than it ever was with Zoomtown.

Zoomtown blocks websites, so I took my scarce money elsewhere. Fair is fair. Competition works. Corporate monopolies don't. Zoomtown wants to treat us like we're in a dictatorship that censors media. I can't remember offhand ever hearing of any other American ISP blocking a website over content.

This cuts my last tie with Cincinnati Bell. I once used them for both phone and Internet, because they effectively had a monopoly on both. But - now that there's competition - I use them for neither. In the case of both Internet and phone, I switched not because somebody advertised a better deal. I switched because Cincinnati Bell did something completely intolerable with the service I was getting.

If a company wants people to buy from them, they should provide a quality product - not rely on their cronies in government to give them a monopoly.

I also now suspect that Zoomtown was blocking e-mails. Last year, when Occupy Cincinnati briefly had a newsletter, I signed up to receive it by e-mail, but I never got it. Occupy head honchos told me they sent me each issue. But it was nowhere to be seen - not in my main e-mail folder, not in my spam folder, nowhere. Considering the effort that was put forth by Corporate America at trying to destroy Occupy, I'm now almost certain that Zoomtown intentionally blocked Occupy's newsletter from reaching me.

I feel courageous for having dropped Cincinnati Bellyache. The fact that I feel like a pioneer for dropping them proves what an impenetrable stranglehold they've had on the local telcom business. Cincinnati is a corporate-minded city, and Big Business has been known for using intimidation to keep people in line.