Making Cents - A blog by Daymon Hoag

You thought I was going to talk about car insurance didn’t you? All joking aside, I really did save a good amount of money over the past year, but it wasn’t on insurance; it was on my home phone service using voip. When most people think of voip they think of computer software like Skype, MSN, or Yahoo messenger where you can call other computers or even home phones, but you need a headset, or speakers and microphone to do this. While these programs do use voip technology, they are not phone services.

There is a way to use voip technology to replace your landline telephone service completely, and for about half the cost. Last year, I signed up for a local and long distance phone service plan and paid $200 plus taxes and fees for the entire year. I did have to pay Uncle Sam about three dollars and some change each month for government regulatory fees that had nothing to do with the phone service itself. You know how that goes. Uncle Sam’s hands always seem to find their way into my pocket!

Back to the story at hand, I signed on with a company called Packet8 who offered the phone service package as mentioned above, plus I got a Uniden UIP165P expandable voip phone base as pictured here for free after I mailed in a rebate form. I only paid about $45 dollars up front for a phone system that was around $150 at the time. You can get up to ten handsets with chargers that are compatible with this base, but who needs 10 phones? The point is that you don’t need a landline service to have a phone in every room of your house.

After checking the Packet8 site, I noticed they still have the phone base that I purchased a year ago, but now they have a new one that is free up front. It doesn’t have all of the nifty gadgets on it like mine does, but it is expandable, and the handsets themselves have plenty of gadgets if you like that sort of thing. If you want to use the phone you already have you can do that too. They will just supply you with a router that you can hook your phone up to.

I have to admit, it was nice to pay one bill for the whole year and not have to worry about it again. It just doesn’t get any cheaper than that for home phone service folks, plus you get all of the goodies like caller i.d., three way calling, call forwarding, the list goes on, and they’re all included at no extra cost. One year has gone by, and they just billed me again. This time the bill was even less because I already have the phone. My total bill was $214.80 for one year. That’s about four months worth of phone bills for most people.

As far as the quality goes, I personally have no complaints. For the better part of the year I had 10Mbps broadband, then switched to 7 Mbps which is still pretty fast and may have played a part in the quality of my calls. I really don’t know what the quality would be like at lower speeds, but I really had no more issues with things like interference, or dropped calls than what is typical with a landline phone company. I haven’t had to call 911 either, so I don’t know what the response time is. All I know is this is dirt cheap home phone service, and if you know of anything cheaper I challenge you to prove it.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 22nd, 2008 at 10:37 am and is filed under Ways to Save Money. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.