I am REPOSTING this today because the Ooma device is one sale today!
My friend Becky followed up her post last week on dropping cable, with a good post today about what they are doing with their phone service and how they saved money.
From Becky: Many families these days have gone to cell phones only. For my family of 6 we need a landline, but the monthly cost was about $45 per month. We have been exploring ways to cut our monthly bills, and I spent some time researching Ooma.
Ooma provides phone service over your internet line, similar to Vonage. But with Ooma, you buy the device and have no monthly charges except for your access fees and taxes with are less than $5 per month. The Ooma device costs $139. I bought mine at Target, using my Red debit card to get 5% off, and also to make a return easy if I wasn’t happy with how it worked. First, we set it up with a random phone number available from Ooma. We hooked up the phone, and used it to make several phone calls to make sure the sound quality was good. We could hear a sound delay initially, but after the first couple phone calls, that disappeared, no one can tell we are using anything different.
Once we were satisfied with it, we paid $39 to have our home phone number ported over. That took about a week. The upfront cost of buying the equipment will pay for itself within a few months. We are very happy with the switch and the savings we receive each month by dropping dish for Roku, and by trading traditional phone service for Ooma.
What have you used to lower your monthly phone service?
Part comedian, part Dad, part athlete. He will boss around your children while they play ball.
Just as angelic as she looks, this girl could easily raise a Village by herself, and all the children would grow up to be President.
Self proclaimed, she would be a webkinz dog. Because, "they're cute, and puppies are too. And they're sweet and they always get along with other puppies."
This mini-Martha Stewart can handle ANY craft you send her way. She isn't all bows and rainbows, she's got karate kid moves!
Not "Pick-Me-Up" like caffeine, she wants you to pick her up! AND NOW!
Anything that can be destroyed WILL be destroyed!
Practically Perfect in Every Way for now! Nicknamed "The Panda" she is rolly polly and lives by the motto, "the little one, is KING!"
The resident Labradoodle, Miller got his name because Mom won and got to name the baby! Need something chewed up? He'll take care of it. Especially if it's expensive..
My only concern with dropping a traditional land line is 911 service. I’m sure you can call 911 with an internet phone or a cell phone but what happens if 911 needs to trace your phone back to your home address? For example, if a burglar breaks in and you dial 911 but the burglar gets hold of your “internet” phone and hangs it up? Or if you or your family calls an then puts the phone down for some reason. With a traditional landline 911 can trace your phone line and lookup your street address and then dispatch police and/or an ambulance to that address. Does any one know if 911 can trace the address of an “internet only” phone.
We change service providers every time our contract ( That means special deal in our area) is up. I just signed a 12 month contract with U verse for 39.99 for internet and a land line. We were paying 24.99 just for our internet so an extra 15.00 for a land line is a good deal for us. Now the area we live in requires me to have a land line for safety/medical reasons. It’s not so much of a trouble to change providers as often the retention department will often negotiate with you to keep their service. Numbers transfer easy so it is worth my time to play one companies deals against the other. I have peace of mind that in an emergency, one of my children will easily be able to accurately summon medical help to our residence if needed.
http://www.ooma.com/911
It is up the registered customer to keep their location up to date with Ooma, even once you add or update your address it does not take place immediately. Also the local jurisdiction has to be e911 enabled. I personally am not ready to take that risk. It should be ok to make a test call to 911, immediately let the dispatcher know it is a test and that you are testing your VoIP service and want to check to see if your address is showing up correctly in their database. We have Fios and I have been thinking about moving the land line back to copper since we have had some unexpectedly long power outages the last few years.
We also dropped our cable for Roku, every once in awhile it does load, but it is worth the $80 monthly savings, we purchased ours through playon
because it offered more channels.