Looking to get away from traditional land line, wife hates her cell phone so we are looking for something different and wondering if anybody has and good ones
looking at
OOMA
Skype
Vonage
???
thanks for the help
Mike
I am a Vonage Customer (I also have Skype, but Vonage provides POTS, Skype doesn’t) and have been for about 18 months. I just disconnected the incoming lines at the terminal block,and connected up the Vonage adapter to a standard RJ11 jack, and that’s that. In general Vonage voice quality is excellent (they use much higher data rates than a mobile phone uses). The only thing that is a little distubring is that when you are on hold, the background noise can completely disappear. The adapter plugs into a port on your router (no computer is required). It is about 6 x 6 x 1 inches, plus a ‘wall wart’ power supply.
In the event your internet connection is out, you can have the calls forwarded to a cell phone or another landline…
another great feature is visual voice mail. Your voice mail is transcribed to text and sent to you as an email. It isn’t perfect, but it is very good at accurately transcribing the message. It also sends you a .wav file of the actual voice mail as well. Caller ID is standard, as well as host of other features.
Vonage costs me about $19 a month with all fees and taxes for 300 minutes outgoing. Incoming is free. That’s about half what Verizon wants for the
same services. I gave up on Verizon when they decided they needed to charge for the privledge of being able to make long distance calls in addition to the charges for the calls themselves. I never used the landline to make such calls because Skype was much less expensive for the volume of long distance calling I did.
About the only potential down side for VOIP services roviders is your number doesn’t get published anywhere (which may be a benefit ).
How does free sound? I have google voice for more than a year now and totally love the service, free local and domestic long distance and I even got to pick my own phone number! I am using an OBI110 device to connect it to my regular phone and not use the PC, it can work with cell phone too to save minutes and long distance calls, it totally pwns any other phone company I have used, period!
Google voice? I’m gonna have to check that out!
We have Verizon Home Connect. It’s a cell phone you connect to your wired phones. It works pretty good and it’s $20 a month plus fees and taxes.
What I don’t see with Google Voice is E911 service. With Vonage (and probably other landline VOIP providers), your phone number is registered with local 911 services, so if you call 911, they know your street address amd can dispatch immediately. At the moment Google Voice can only ‘port’ mobile phone numbers, and for fairly obvious reasons, this serious limits 911 capability.
I used magic Jack for about three years and still have the service, but I ended up with free regular phone with my new internet provider which is unlimited too, so I just stopped plugging it in. If you have very good high speed internet magic jack works like a charm. If not then don’t bother.
You can setup 911 for $12 a year with the OBI110 device
Can’t think of the name, but a friends family has cellphones and a magic jack like service that uses ones internet connection to call and be called. All I know is that it was cheaper than magic jack per year, but cost like five bucks more to buy the device.
Only land line service where I live is quest or now century link and its ridiculously overpriced @over 82.00 $ a month there is no cell service due to close proximity to 2 open pit mines and no cable serivice either, one concern I had was I heard that during thundstorms service suffers is this true we would really like to save paying what we are thanks.