Are you still paying for plain old telephone service (POTS) from a huge conglomerate, like AT & T, Verizon, or Qwest? Do you ever ask yourself why? If you're paying more than $30 a month for phone service (think about voicemail, caller ID, call waiting, or features you pay for like *69) you should consider making a jump to a VoIP provider.

Do you get charged for long distance? It's 2006. It's time for these huge companies to be innovative, and if you pay attention, they're getting the message. AT & T now offers a VoIP service, but it's still almost 40%-50% higher cost than other new players in the market.

Vonage. Yeah, strange name. We've had Vonage for almost two years. Early on, it was dicey at best. I had several times where I thought I would lose the battle (with my wife) and have to switch back. But we stuck it out, and it's really great. We pay $27.xx a month and that includes unlimted phone service, with all the goodies. Caller ID, *69, call rejection, call waiting, ... the works. The best part is the voicemail. You can setup the system to email your voicemail messages to any address. You can also log into the vonage web site and listen to your voice mail messages. I wrote a tray application that notifies you of voicemail, grab it for free.

So the biggest issues people have switching from POTS to VoIP I see as the following:

• I want to keep my existing phone number. - You can. Vonage will let you keep your existing number.
• I'm worried about the call quality - It's really good now, truthfully every now and then we have a 'strange call'
• I'm worried about 911, it won't work with VoIP right? - This is one of those things that's been so over hyped that I see this as one of the biggest barriers to entry. When you sign up w/ the vonage service you can establish a primary address as the place where you want 911 to be dispatched. The whole thing with VoIP phone service, is that I can take my phone adapter and plug it into any network. So even though I live across town, I could bring the box to your house, plug it into your network, and if you called my phone number, my phone would ring in your house. So this forces the providers to make you establish a default dispatch address for 911. So if you call 911 and have your vonage box at another address, they'll come to your house. I think you'll see that this is a situation that would probably not happen.
• What if my internet is down? - You can configure a phone number to relay calls to. We use my cell phone, and there have been times where I've gotten a weird call in the middle of the day, and the person calling said, "I called you at home" Then a lighbulb goes off in my head, and I say to myself, "Ahhhh my internet connection must be down". It's happened so rarely that I'm usually suprised when it does occur.
• How will I get it working on all my phones? - Another simple solution. Once you get the service, you unplug your outside phone box from the street (one screw and a painfully obvious connection to unplug from the inside of the box) and just plug your vonage box into any phone extension, it will then link all of your extensions to the vonage box.
   

That's it. I opened the adapter, which looks like a small answering machine, plugged it into my network, plugged it into the wall, and then plugged it into the phone jack, and that was it. It was up and running in 30 seconds. It's one of those things I take for granted now. I forget we even have anything different.

But I love the money we save, and that we're not being nickle and dimed to death for things like caller ID and voicemail. Let me know  if you have questions, if you want to sign up, I can get you a month for free.