Maven Mapper's

To echo Michael's sentiment, I opt for several layers of redundancy at home these days. I keep a home office and being disconnected isn't really an option.

I have a landline through At&t, whom I despise and would almost rather chop off any body appendage on the left side of my body rather than do business with them, but redundancy is important.

I have DSL on the At&t line as well. This is my first level of redundant backup. Its too slow and quirky when it comes to a number of applications (like email). But its better than nothing.

TimeWarner's Roadrunner is my cable connection. It is pretty fast most of the time and only goes down for a few hours every couple weeks.

I get cable through DirectTv. Just maintaining momentum here. Don't like nor dislike them.

Then I have an air card through Verizon Wireless which can power my 3g Wireless Router and create a WiFi network at the house or anywhere when DSL and Cable internet are both down. So far that has only happened once this year since I set up the additional layers of redundancy.

I am none to happy with Verizon Wireless as they just ripped me off for $500 last month. They sold me a lemon of a phone, replaced it 3 times under the warranty I was paying for and none of the replacements worked. They would not take the phone back, give me my money back or give me a different model of phone (presumably one that worked).

Their only advice to me over the phone was to sell my lemon of a phone on ebay to some poor sucker out there. (They did not use the word sucker directly. But when I asked them if they admitted that I had a lemon of a phone, they agreed. When I asked if it was right to sell a lemon of a phone to someone, they agreed that this would be bad. When I asked what I should do with the phone? They said (again) many of our customers sell their (lemon) phones on ebay, you could sell yours on ebay. But it is a lemon of a phone that doesn't work. How can that be right? I ask.

They agreed and said that would be wrong, but that's what Verizon customers do.

I said, I did not want to harm someone else with a lemon, not to mention harm my own name, or even cost Verizon more money for the tech support calls they would receive from the poor sap that would purchase my phone. Verizon thanked me for that.

So I asked again what I could do with my lemon of a phone. They said, You could sell it on ebay. (I'm not kidding or exaggerating. They told me 4 times to sell my phone on ebay during the same conversation with the same rep, who agreed with me that it would be just wrong to sell the phone on ebay knowing that it was a lemon myself and with Verizon having documented the fact that it was a lemon in their own system.)

I hung up with the feeling that there was a supervisor standing behind her telling her to repeat the company line "Sell your lemon Verizon Wireless phone on Ebay" "No Refunds"

I learned my lesson with Verizon Wireless. Their warranty, $6 a month, is garbage. They just replace lemons with lemons. They might as well offer customers t shirts stating, "I paid $500 for a garbage phone with a service plan that cost $325 a month and all I received was 45 hours on the phone with tech support and a paper weight shaped treo 700P".