AT&T (and SBC) sucks

Where I live, AT&T is the only company I can get basic phone service from, and I have to have basic phone service before I can get DSL from a decent ISP like Sonic (who won't go out of their way to throttle your connection, hijack your DNS, or share your surfing habits with the government).

AT&T, of course, would rather have you spend hundreds of dollars a month on crappy internet, phone, TV and wireless service.

Pitfalls:

• AT&T's site, once you get to the part where you're signing up for basic phone service, is incredibly slow.  Literally minutes for each page to load.  Find something else to do while you wait.  Clicking "continue" multiple times will screw things up, so click it once and wait.  Sometimes you'll get a "loading" cursor, sometimes you won't.

• After I made it all the way to the end, I learned that the second-to-last confirmation page doesn't work with Chrome.  So I got to restart with Firefox.  Yay.

• Of course they're going to try to upsell you every step of the way, including charging you if you DON'T want to appear in the phone book.  (But at least you can list what name you show up under).

• Metered rate service is the cheapest option.  Under this plan you actually have to pay for local calls.  Or something.  I don't care; I'm not even going to hook a phone up to it.  And of course they're not going to make that easy to find. 

Step by step:

• Start here to check availability at your address: http://www.att.com/shop/availability.html?product_suite=uverse&success_token=HR_Home_Phone&saveme=True

• Once you've put in your address, at the next page, mouseover "Home Phone" and click "Home Phone Plans".

• Then click "Order now" under the "Start New Service with AT&T" on the right sidebar.

• They won't show you the cheap options, of course. Click the "View additional Home Phone options" link at the bottom to show the cheap ones.

You can probably figure it out from there.