Telephone Woes in Rural America

Last week, I moved from the house I have been renting to a furnished basement apartment approximately 20 km away, in West Jefferson which is truly rural America.

To my great dissapointment there is no AT&T network in the area so my BlackBerry does not work. If I thought two bars of signal strength was bad, I now have none at my new home.

With a good WiFi Internet connection from my neighbor, and landlord, I thought I could continue using VOIP. But I cannot use my Vonage telephone account because the equipment requires direct connection to the modem using a cable.

I started scrambling looking for alternatives so that my family had a phone in the house. I could not figure out how Google Voice works; as it seems to require a connection to an existing phone line e.g. cell phone or home phone.

My attempt to add credit to my Skype account using my debit card failed. It resulted in a letter from the fraud department at my bank. I guess trying to use my debit card at night from a different IP address made the bank suspicious. That almost got my debit card cancelled as the bank tried to call me on my cell phone that was not working.

Someone that had lived in the area suggested I try Verizon. I bought a pre-paid LG 5600 phone for $29.88; which comes with $10.00 airtime. To my utter frustration I could not activate the phone because it barely had one bar of signal strength.

Several days later the family that had hosted a good nyama choma (barbeque in Kiswahili) on July 4, followed us home to to see our new place. To my pleasant surprise their Verizon phone worked in our house.

With renewed motivation I went to the Verizon shop in Boone determined to activate the phone. The lady working alone in the store, as far as I could tell, was very kind and helped me get setup. She explained that the signal was weak in the area I had moved to hence the failure with the activation. Carolina West works best there she said, that’s why we do not have a store in that area.

The LG verizon phone is now working in the house and suprisingly it has two to three bars of signal strength. I was grateful but wondered why the signal was so much better than last week when I was struggling to activate the phone. This final puzzle was solved when my landlord mentioned he has a device that boosts the Verizon network signal strength in his house.