RIDGE MANOR -- Until this month, it was sometimes cheaper for Ridge Manor resident Erma Carr to run errands using her car than it was to pick up her telephone to do the same job.

That was because her Sprint telephone provider charged Carr and 4,000 area residents 25 cents to telephone the Brooksville area.

Although the distance between the Carr home and Brooksville is only a dozen miles, Carr and her neighbors had to pay 25 cents per call.

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FAIRHAVEN, Mass. — Michael Brightman is reminded daily that workers in New Delhi do the same job he does.

His Indian counterparts routinely direct AT&T customers to him for long-distance billing problems that the New Delhi workers can’t answer.

Brightman and 139 others will be laid off this month from AT&T’s call center on Massachusetts’ southeastern coast. AT&T said the work force reduction resulted from a July decision to phase out residential long-distance service.

«This work did not move. It went away,» said spokeswoman Tracey Belko. «We are not moving any of these jobs overseas.»

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Advertiser Staff

Verizon Hawai’i has donated 1,000 long-distance phone cards worth $10,000 to soldiers of the 100th Battalion, 442nd Infantry.

More than 600 soldiers from the unit are training in Fort Bliss, Texas, and will be sent to Iraq next year.

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Harrisburg, Pa. — Philadelphia’s plan to offer inexpensive wireless Internet as a municipal service — the most ambitious yet by a major U.S. city — has collided with commercial interests including the local phone company, Verizon Communications Inc.
Regional and long-distance phone companies, who sell broadband Internet to consumers and businesses, have in recent months intensified a national campaign to quash municipal wireless initiatives like Philadelphia’s as dozens of cities and towns have either begun or announced such plans — from San Francisco to Chaska, Minn., to St. Cloud, Fla.

Telecommunications companies are doubly worried because hundreds of other municipalities provide broadband service over cable or telephone lines.

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BY JOHN MORAN
THE HARTFORD COURANT

Own a telephone, someone once said, and you give 6 billion people the right to wake you up in the middle of the night. Fortunately, most can’t be bothered.

But even that possibility highlights what a stupid and unruly brute the traditional telephone is. Someone calls, the phone rings, and you are bound to answer it — or at least be interrupted by it.

Internet telephone service — otherwise known as voice over Internet protocol, or more simply VOIP — promises to change all that, offering consumers sweeping and sophisticated control over how the phone works at an affordable price.

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The Community Agency for Senior Citizens is a good place to start if you have questions about care
Monday, November 29, 2004

As executive director of the Community Agency for Senior Citizens (CASC), Richard Reetz can relate to the dilemma that adult children face when trying to care for aging parents and loved ones from afar.

While Reetz was living on Staten Island, trying to balance his responsibilities on the job and at home, he was also trying to care for his own older parents back «home» in his native Massachusetts. His sister, his only sibling, lived even further away, in California.

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