So then, after you ran your calculus, you determined that it would be the best recommendation to other people as well without telling them about your calculus?
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Help me drop my land line
- Thread starter mavrick1903
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So then, after you ran your calculus, you determined that it would be the best recommendation to other people as well without telling them about your calculus?
When you set up MagicJack your street address is entered into the software and if you should ever call 911 your street address is shown to the 911 operator so they can send authorities to you.
I didn't think it necessary or appropriate for me to detail each and every reason for my decision in a forum such as this one. I posted my suggestion for the OP. You have appropriately pointed out a reason for NOT canceling a landline. The OP and others relying upon this thread can make their own decisions based on their particular needs. I'll just leave it at that.
Thanks, I had that part figured out.
Truth is it's not really a land line, It's from the cable company (Charter here in my area). The reason I want a WiFi phone is really to deal with the coverage we have in the house. it's ok, but not great. WiFi/VoIP would cover the gap.
I use my mobile as that number I give everyone and I have to say that I can count on my fingers how many unknown or unauthorized calls (telemarketers...etc) I have gotten in my 6 years of having that number. I was getting those calls about extending my car warranty but every number in the country it seems was being robo-called by those numbskulls.
I think part of it is the fact that since it IS a mobile number, it's essentially unlisted and by nature already on a sort of do-not-call list.
The only good reason I have read in this thread for keeping a landline would be if you had a security system that needed one. 911 dispatchers are getting technology to help them locate cell calls based on GPS and cell tower triangulation. 'Spam' calls are not an issue for me (are they for any of the others here?)
Heck, my wife and I are on the 550 minute AT&T plan and we never, I repeat NEVER go over. We commonly use about 2-300 minutes a month. I have thousands of rollover minutes I shall never use.
There's just no good reason that I can see to shell out 25-40+ bucks a month for something that is merely a duplicate of my cell phone.
Last edited:
It really depends on where you live; I live in a rural area that has no cell phone service, so a land line is required. Even if we ever do get cellular service in my area I will keep the land line. If you have good cellular service in your home a land line is not necessary, but as previous comments show it still has its uses especially for the 911 system.
Power Outages and Telephone Service
All telephone service customers should be aware that during a major power outage:
Traditional telephone service will be operational unless telephone lines have been damaged. Please note that cordless phones require electricity and will not work.
Cell phones that are charged will work unless cell towers have been damaged. Consider purchasing a car charger since home cell phone chargers require electricity.
Other Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone services will not work unless battery backup is available.
Power Outages and Telephone Service
All telephone service customers should be aware that during a major power outage:
Traditional telephone service will be operational unless telephone lines have been damaged. Please note that cordless phones require electricity and will not work.
Cell phones that are charged will work unless cell towers have been damaged. Consider purchasing a car charger since home cell phone chargers require electricity.
Other Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone services will not work unless battery backup is available.
I'm in the U.S. and have my iphone number registered with the do not call registry. No unwanted calls on my cell phone.
I dumped my landline in 2000.
I've had this phone number (cell) since 1997 and have had NO unwanted blocked or unknown number calls.
Zero. For me, paying for a land line just didn't make sense any more. I have my cell, and now I also have a google voice number. I get NO telemarketing calls, NO political calls and have zero problems with blocked and unknown numbers.
Again...read what my experience has been without being on the do not call list btw...I have had maybe 1 or 2 calls you can consider a telemarketer or annoyance phonecall in the 6 years I have had this cell phone. I am not including the big auto warranty scamming last year because EVERY number in the US was getting called...my elderly mother who doesn't own a car...young teens not yet old enough to drive..etc...do not call list be damned. You count those, then I have had about 15 unsolicited/annoyance calls since 2004....2.5 a year....an average of one about every 150 days? When we also had a landline from 2004-2007 (same timeframe as the cell), I estimate we got a telemarketer 2-5 times a week calling that landline number
As I said, I think it may be because cell phones are 'unlisted' numbers basically...a built-in 'do not call' list!
And YES, I do put this number down on all those lists where someone requests my number and even then I have not had any calls I would deem annoyances. I get calls from my bank if I have a late payment, but that's to be expected. Some folks...I'm sure ...think that's harassment.
My experience is like the posters who have had their cell lines since 1997 and 2000 respectively.
IF worrying about people having your cell number is the issue and you are assuming you will have a flood of unwanted calls...you won't.
You DON'T need to shell out the extra cash for a landline...assuming you have reasonable cell coverage at your home.
Same here. Cell phones with Google Voice is the answer, since I have 4 activated lines that I use for my smartphone addiction. With GV I have one number which will "find me" no matter which phone I'm using as my primary phone on any given day. I've used GV for some time now. It's very reliable and flexible. Can you say "free" ...
Same here. Cell phones with Google Voice is the answer, since I have 4 activated lines that I use for my smartphone addiction. With GV I have one number which will "find me" no matter which phone I'm using as my primary phone on any given day. I've used GV for some time now. It's very reliable and flexible. Can you say "free" ...
Are you inundated with telemarketing and political calls on your 4 cell phone lines? Serious question....you have 4 times the possibility of getting annoying calls than I do.
Great question. I've taken the needed measures to prevent those types of calls and enjoyed great success. Far better than I thought possible.
I received a single call during the election cycle. Thanks to GV it was easy to screen & ignore. I'm very pleased with the setup I have.
See...and I have taken NO precautions against getting SPAM calls and I never get them.
Another reason why it's OK to drop the landline folks!
Until and unless I can totally eliminate the AT&T "Call Failed" issue when doing 3-way calling with my iPhone, I can't eliminate my land line for my home office.
It annoys the crap out of me. Even if I switch to Edge only for 3-way calling, I get a "Call Failed" drop of all parties at least ONCE per call. Usually more than that. This is while maintaining a full 4 bars during the call. Annoys the crap out of me so much I just pay for the dedicated Uverse VOIP line and have no issues. With Uverse, once I added in HD TV digital service + high speed internet + 2 dedicated VOIP lines (home and home office), the whole bill ended up being cheaper than what I was paying for analog telephone X2 + HD Cable alone. Its like I got high-speed internet for free. I also get unified billing since my AT&T wireless bill just goes onto the Uverse bill.
It annoys the crap out of me. Even if I switch to Edge only for 3-way calling, I get a "Call Failed" drop of all parties at least ONCE per call. Usually more than that. This is while maintaining a full 4 bars during the call. Annoys the crap out of me so much I just pay for the dedicated Uverse VOIP line and have no issues. With Uverse, once I added in HD TV digital service + high speed internet + 2 dedicated VOIP lines (home and home office), the whole bill ended up being cheaper than what I was paying for analog telephone X2 + HD Cable alone. Its like I got high-speed internet for free. I also get unified billing since my AT&T wireless bill just goes onto the Uverse bill.
Last edited:
GV is not VOIP.
Here's a summary of my own adventure into the wonders of VOIP. I composed it for some friends; it might have some nuggets for you. Good luck!
===
We've lived in our current house for fourteen years and have
maintained a conventional landline phone service all that time. We
hardly use the home phone anymore, though, since we all have cell
phones with plenty of minutes. But, calling overseas is costly on
those, and we need the home phone for 911 emergencies and just because
so many friends, family and businesses know it. But our average
monthly home phone bill has been hovering around $35, almost more than
it's been worth.
It's possible to sign up with a service like Vonage or AT&T's
voice-over-internet (VOIP) offering, but the cost savings weren't
compelling, and you have to use their phone adapters or buy new phones
from them-- and those typically won't work with any other service you
might subsequently try. These companies do, however, offer to port
your landline phone number for a minimal fee. So you can sign up with
them and transition your familiar number over.
Two years ago I learned of a nice-sounding service called MagicJack,
operating in Florida. This is a little dongle that attaches to the
USB port of a personal computer; you connect a conventional analog
phone (or multi-handset wireless phone) to it, and voila:
voice-over-internet. I ordered one and, for trial, hooked it up to an
obsolete Windows laptop. It worked, but I wasn't comfortable at the
thought of hitching our family communications to a machine running
Windows 24 hours a day. Fortunately the founder of MagicJack had
given public interviews stating that Linux compatibility was imminent
(meaning I could put a nice little super-reliable low-power diskless
VOIP server together), as was landline-number porting.
That was two years ago, however, and to-date they still haven't made
good on either promise. So I finally looked around for other
services.
Turns out this is the Golden Age of "bring-your-own-device" VOIP
providers with really affordable pay-as-you-go pricing models,
complemented by astonishingly cost-effective hardware adapters that
let you use your old phones and don't require a computer. In my
research, two VOIP providers stuck out as particularly promising:
CallCentric and Voip.ms. Both offer free signups, affordable
landline-number porting, and great per-minute rates.
I ended up choosing voip.ms based on some great user reviews and
because of its unusually rich feature-set. The setup process was
straightforward and browser-based. I was able to provision and start
using a temporary number in my neighborhood in a few minutes. I
tested this out using a couple of VOIP applications on my iPhone and
computer. Cool! I can make and receive calls from anywhere there's
WiFi as if I were at home. The only caveat is that their
browser-based setup kiosk can be kind of intimidating, as it's a bit
of an acronym-fest. But I found the learning curve to be fairly
shallow and quick.
For the home phones, again after some research I ordered a Linksys
PAP2T-NA analog telephone adaptor from Amazon for $49 with free
shipping and no tax. This is a little gizmo, about the size of a pack
of cards, which plugs into my WiFi router and then into any
conventional phone and can be used with any VOIP provider. It's easy
to set up, too.
Newly confident, I started voip.ms on the process of porting the
number over. This took about ten days and was totally painless, with
progress emails along the way. In fact, whenever I had a question or
issue on any aspect of the service, voip.ms provided snappy support.
I could not be more impressed with them as a company or with the
quality of their service so far. Kudos also to AT&T/Pacific Bell for
their cooperation.
The porting was complete today, so I sauntered out to the phone patch
panel on the wall of our house and unplugged the home line from it.
Then, after verifying that there was no signal on the home lines, I
plugged the little Linksys gizmo into an unused home-phone jack.
Voila: it now provides phone service to every jack in the house.
Bottom line:
o The change is transparent to my wife and others who might use our phones.
o My typical monthly cost will drop from about $35 to less than $5.
The monthly savings are enough for a couple cases of my favorite hoppy
IPA!
o For the plan I chose, calls throughout North America are less than
1.5c/minute, and calls to Germany are less than 1.6c/minute (using the
Premium connection option, which gives best voice quality). There's a
$6.95 plan with free North American calls (up to 3500 minutes/month)
but we don't use the phone enough to make that worthwhile.
o We can set up conference calls with any number of participants.
o Using a free softphone app on our personal computers and iPhones,
we can make and receive calls on our home line anywhere there's WiFi
for these same great rates. (It even works over my iPhone's 3G data
connection.)
o I have it set up so incoming callers now get a voice menu: 1 rings
the home phones, 2 takes a voicemail, and--get this--3 gives an
international dial-tone, password protected, so we can call Europe
from anywhere for cheap. ...I'm really hoping the voice menu will
deflect the election-month robo-callers over the next few weeks... so
annoying! I had a lot of fun setting up my incoming-call greeting:
"Thanks for your call. Friends, family and people with whom we do
business, press 1. For voicemail, press 2 or just wait for the tone.
For an international dialtone, press 3. Telemarketers and
robo-callers, we have a specific digit for you." ;-)
o There's a sophisticated voicemail system which has a wonderful
option to speak the caller's phone number clearly... people have a bad
habit of turbo-talking their phone numbers. Voicemails are also
emailed to my wife and me in the form of .wav attachments which play
crisply on our computers, iPhones and iPad. Very handy, and a free
service!
So I'm delighted.
Not so much with MagicJack, however: I called them up to cancel and
asked for a pro-rated refund of the prepaid 5-year service plan I'd
idiotically signed up for, and for the $10 in prepaid international
minutes I'd purchased. Nope. "Out of the 30-day trial period."
Wouldn't consider. I explained that I'd been waiting for the company
to make good on its published promises-- the porting service is still
promised on their website for "Q1 2010"! The amount of money wasn't
big, but the principle was, so after some polite but firm discussions
with a supervisor in which she would not budge, I advised her that I
had a Better Business Bureau complaint form all filled-out in my
browser, and it was up to them whether I pressed "submit" or not. She
declined again, so out went my complaint. ...The BBB advised me of my
full refund within 48 hours.
Bottom line: Recommended. Highly. If you have a solid Internet
connection at your home or office and a decent router, cut the cord!
(If your service is DSL, work with your phone company prior to the
porting process to ensure your Internet remains in-service.)
Resources:
voip.ms: http://www.voip.ms
Linksys PAP2T-NA:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias=aps&field-keywords=PAP2T-NA
Free PC, Mac and iPhone VOIP phone software: Whistle Phone (choose the
"generic SIP account" option): http://www.whistlephone.com
Great router for residential or business use, with an excellent
firewall and quality-of-service engine for good VOIP performance:
Linksys DIR-655:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias=aps&field-keywords=d-link+dir-655
Here's a summary of my own adventure into the wonders of VOIP. I composed it for some friends; it might have some nuggets for you. Good luck!
===
We've lived in our current house for fourteen years and have
maintained a conventional landline phone service all that time. We
hardly use the home phone anymore, though, since we all have cell
phones with plenty of minutes. But, calling overseas is costly on
those, and we need the home phone for 911 emergencies and just because
so many friends, family and businesses know it. But our average
monthly home phone bill has been hovering around $35, almost more than
it's been worth.
It's possible to sign up with a service like Vonage or AT&T's
voice-over-internet (VOIP) offering, but the cost savings weren't
compelling, and you have to use their phone adapters or buy new phones
from them-- and those typically won't work with any other service you
might subsequently try. These companies do, however, offer to port
your landline phone number for a minimal fee. So you can sign up with
them and transition your familiar number over.
Two years ago I learned of a nice-sounding service called MagicJack,
operating in Florida. This is a little dongle that attaches to the
USB port of a personal computer; you connect a conventional analog
phone (or multi-handset wireless phone) to it, and voila:
voice-over-internet. I ordered one and, for trial, hooked it up to an
obsolete Windows laptop. It worked, but I wasn't comfortable at the
thought of hitching our family communications to a machine running
Windows 24 hours a day. Fortunately the founder of MagicJack had
given public interviews stating that Linux compatibility was imminent
(meaning I could put a nice little super-reliable low-power diskless
VOIP server together), as was landline-number porting.
That was two years ago, however, and to-date they still haven't made
good on either promise. So I finally looked around for other
services.
Turns out this is the Golden Age of "bring-your-own-device" VOIP
providers with really affordable pay-as-you-go pricing models,
complemented by astonishingly cost-effective hardware adapters that
let you use your old phones and don't require a computer. In my
research, two VOIP providers stuck out as particularly promising:
CallCentric and Voip.ms. Both offer free signups, affordable
landline-number porting, and great per-minute rates.
I ended up choosing voip.ms based on some great user reviews and
because of its unusually rich feature-set. The setup process was
straightforward and browser-based. I was able to provision and start
using a temporary number in my neighborhood in a few minutes. I
tested this out using a couple of VOIP applications on my iPhone and
computer. Cool! I can make and receive calls from anywhere there's
WiFi as if I were at home. The only caveat is that their
browser-based setup kiosk can be kind of intimidating, as it's a bit
of an acronym-fest. But I found the learning curve to be fairly
shallow and quick.
For the home phones, again after some research I ordered a Linksys
PAP2T-NA analog telephone adaptor from Amazon for $49 with free
shipping and no tax. This is a little gizmo, about the size of a pack
of cards, which plugs into my WiFi router and then into any
conventional phone and can be used with any VOIP provider. It's easy
to set up, too.
Newly confident, I started voip.ms on the process of porting the
number over. This took about ten days and was totally painless, with
progress emails along the way. In fact, whenever I had a question or
issue on any aspect of the service, voip.ms provided snappy support.
I could not be more impressed with them as a company or with the
quality of their service so far. Kudos also to AT&T/Pacific Bell for
their cooperation.
The porting was complete today, so I sauntered out to the phone patch
panel on the wall of our house and unplugged the home line from it.
Then, after verifying that there was no signal on the home lines, I
plugged the little Linksys gizmo into an unused home-phone jack.
Voila: it now provides phone service to every jack in the house.
Bottom line:
o The change is transparent to my wife and others who might use our phones.
o My typical monthly cost will drop from about $35 to less than $5.
The monthly savings are enough for a couple cases of my favorite hoppy
IPA!
o For the plan I chose, calls throughout North America are less than
1.5c/minute, and calls to Germany are less than 1.6c/minute (using the
Premium connection option, which gives best voice quality). There's a
$6.95 plan with free North American calls (up to 3500 minutes/month)
but we don't use the phone enough to make that worthwhile.
o We can set up conference calls with any number of participants.
o Using a free softphone app on our personal computers and iPhones,
we can make and receive calls on our home line anywhere there's WiFi
for these same great rates. (It even works over my iPhone's 3G data
connection.)
o I have it set up so incoming callers now get a voice menu: 1 rings
the home phones, 2 takes a voicemail, and--get this--3 gives an
international dial-tone, password protected, so we can call Europe
from anywhere for cheap. ...I'm really hoping the voice menu will
deflect the election-month robo-callers over the next few weeks... so
annoying! I had a lot of fun setting up my incoming-call greeting:
"Thanks for your call. Friends, family and people with whom we do
business, press 1. For voicemail, press 2 or just wait for the tone.
For an international dialtone, press 3. Telemarketers and
robo-callers, we have a specific digit for you." ;-)
o There's a sophisticated voicemail system which has a wonderful
option to speak the caller's phone number clearly... people have a bad
habit of turbo-talking their phone numbers. Voicemails are also
emailed to my wife and me in the form of .wav attachments which play
crisply on our computers, iPhones and iPad. Very handy, and a free
service!
So I'm delighted.
Not so much with MagicJack, however: I called them up to cancel and
asked for a pro-rated refund of the prepaid 5-year service plan I'd
idiotically signed up for, and for the $10 in prepaid international
minutes I'd purchased. Nope. "Out of the 30-day trial period."
Wouldn't consider. I explained that I'd been waiting for the company
to make good on its published promises-- the porting service is still
promised on their website for "Q1 2010"! The amount of money wasn't
big, but the principle was, so after some polite but firm discussions
with a supervisor in which she would not budge, I advised her that I
had a Better Business Bureau complaint form all filled-out in my
browser, and it was up to them whether I pressed "submit" or not. She
declined again, so out went my complaint. ...The BBB advised me of my
full refund within 48 hours.
Bottom line: Recommended. Highly. If you have a solid Internet
connection at your home or office and a decent router, cut the cord!
(If your service is DSL, work with your phone company prior to the
porting process to ensure your Internet remains in-service.)
Resources:
voip.ms: http://www.voip.ms
Linksys PAP2T-NA:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias=aps&field-keywords=PAP2T-NA
Free PC, Mac and iPhone VOIP phone software: Whistle Phone (choose the
"generic SIP account" option): http://www.whistlephone.com
Great router for residential or business use, with an excellent
firewall and quality-of-service engine for good VOIP performance:
Linksys DIR-655:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias=aps&field-keywords=d-link+dir-655
As an Amazon Associate, MacRumors earns a commission from qualifying purchases made through links in this post.
I need a landline for dsl, the only choice other that satellite here. I got the most basic rate, lifeline, which is only about $8.00 or so and it is an alternative way to call as well.
GV is not VOIP.
Here's a summary of my own adventure into the wonders of VOIP. I composed it for some friends; it might have some nuggets for you. Good luck!
===
We've lived in our current house for fourteen years and have
maintained a conventional landline phone service all that time. We
hardly use the home phone anymore, though, since we all have cell
phones with plenty of minutes. But, calling overseas is costly on
those, and we need the home phone for 911 emergencies and just because
so many friends, family and businesses know it. But our average
monthly home phone bill has been hovering around $35, almost more than
it's been worth.
It's possible to sign up with a service like Vonage or AT&T's
voice-over-internet (VOIP) offering, but the cost savings weren't
compelling, and you have to use their phone adapters or buy new phones
from them-- and those typically won't work with any other service you
might subsequently try. These companies do, however, offer to port
your landline phone number for a minimal fee. So you can sign up with
them and transition your familiar number over.
Two years ago I learned of a nice-sounding service called MagicJack,
operating in Florida. This is a little dongle that attaches to the
USB port of a personal computer; you connect a conventional analog
phone (or multi-handset wireless phone) to it, and voila:
voice-over-internet. I ordered one and, for trial, hooked it up to an
obsolete Windows laptop. It worked, but I wasn't comfortable at the
thought of hitching our family communications to a machine running
Windows 24 hours a day. Fortunately the founder of MagicJack had
given public interviews stating that Linux compatibility was imminent
(meaning I could put a nice little super-reliable low-power diskless
VOIP server together), as was landline-number porting.
That was two years ago, however, and to-date they still haven't made
good on either promise. So I finally looked around for other
services.
Turns out this is the Golden Age of "bring-your-own-device" VOIP
providers with really affordable pay-as-you-go pricing models,
complemented by astonishingly cost-effective hardware adapters that
let you use your old phones and don't require a computer. In my
research, two VOIP providers stuck out as particularly promising:
CallCentric and Voip.ms. Both offer free signups, affordable
landline-number porting, and great per-minute rates.
I ended up choosing voip.ms based on some great user reviews and
because of its unusually rich feature-set. The setup process was
straightforward and browser-based. I was able to provision and start
using a temporary number in my neighborhood in a few minutes. I
tested this out using a couple of VOIP applications on my iPhone and
computer. Cool! I can make and receive calls from anywhere there's
WiFi as if I were at home. The only caveat is that their
browser-based setup kiosk can be kind of intimidating, as it's a bit
of an acronym-fest. But I found the learning curve to be fairly
shallow and quick.
For the home phones, again after some research I ordered a Linksys
PAP2T-NA analog telephone adaptor from Amazon for $49 with free
shipping and no tax. This is a little gizmo, about the size of a pack
of cards, which plugs into my WiFi router and then into any
conventional phone and can be used with any VOIP provider. It's easy
to set up, too.
Newly confident, I started voip.ms on the process of porting the
number over. This took about ten days and was totally painless, with
progress emails along the way. In fact, whenever I had a question or
issue on any aspect of the service, voip.ms provided snappy support.
I could not be more impressed with them as a company or with the
quality of their service so far. Kudos also to AT&T/Pacific Bell for
their cooperation.
The porting was complete today, so I sauntered out to the phone patch
panel on the wall of our house and unplugged the home line from it.
Then, after verifying that there was no signal on the home lines, I
plugged the little Linksys gizmo into an unused home-phone jack.
Voila: it now provides phone service to every jack in the house.
Bottom line:
o The change is transparent to my wife and others who might use our phones.
o My typical monthly cost will drop from about $35 to less than $5.
The monthly savings are enough for a couple cases of my favorite hoppy
IPA!
o For the plan I chose, calls throughout North America are less than
1.5c/minute, and calls to Germany are less than 1.6c/minute (using the
Premium connection option, which gives best voice quality). There's a
$6.95 plan with free North American calls (up to 3500 minutes/month)
but we don't use the phone enough to make that worthwhile.
o We can set up conference calls with any number of participants.
o Using a free softphone app on our personal computers and iPhones,
we can make and receive calls on our home line anywhere there's WiFi
for these same great rates. (It even works over my iPhone's 3G data
connection.)
o I have it set up so incoming callers now get a voice menu: 1 rings
the home phones, 2 takes a voicemail, and--get this--3 gives an
international dial-tone, password protected, so we can call Europe
from anywhere for cheap. ...I'm really hoping the voice menu will
deflect the election-month robo-callers over the next few weeks... so
annoying! I had a lot of fun setting up my incoming-call greeting:
"Thanks for your call. Friends, family and people with whom we do
business, press 1. For voicemail, press 2 or just wait for the tone.
For an international dialtone, press 3. Telemarketers and
robo-callers, we have a specific digit for you." ;-)
o There's a sophisticated voicemail system which has a wonderful
option to speak the caller's phone number clearly... people have a bad
habit of turbo-talking their phone numbers. Voicemails are also
emailed to my wife and me in the form of .wav attachments which play
crisply on our computers, iPhones and iPad. Very handy, and a free
service!
So I'm delighted.
Not so much with MagicJack, however: I called them up to cancel and
asked for a pro-rated refund of the prepaid 5-year service plan I'd
idiotically signed up for, and for the $10 in prepaid international
minutes I'd purchased. Nope. "Out of the 30-day trial period."
Wouldn't consider. I explained that I'd been waiting for the company
to make good on its published promises-- the porting service is still
promised on their website for "Q1 2010"! The amount of money wasn't
big, but the principle was, so after some polite but firm discussions
with a supervisor in which she would not budge, I advised her that I
had a Better Business Bureau complaint form all filled-out in my
browser, and it was up to them whether I pressed "submit" or not. She
declined again, so out went my complaint. ...The BBB advised me of my
full refund within 48 hours.
Bottom line: Recommended. Highly. If you have a solid Internet
connection at your home or office and a decent router, cut the cord!
(If your service is DSL, work with your phone company prior to the
porting process to ensure your Internet remains in-service.)
Resources:
voip.ms: http://www.voip.ms
Linksys PAP2T-NA:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias=aps&field-keywords=PAP2T-NA
Free PC, Mac and iPhone VOIP phone software: Whistle Phone (choose the
"generic SIP account" option): http://www.whistlephone.com
Great router for residential or business use, with an excellent
firewall and quality-of-service engine for good VOIP performance:
Linksys DIR-655:
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias=aps&field-keywords=d-link+dir-655
Good lord! I'd rather pay the ATT fee than do all that!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
As an Amazon Associate, MacRumors earns a commission from qualifying purchases made through links in this post.
I was looking too how to drop our landline and just use our cell phones.
I tried Skype in which I have an unltd USA calling plan for 2.95/month; skype inbound number and recently Talkatone with Google Voice(unltd USA calls with inbound number)
I'm not sure if it's the apps or att 3G but call quality and reliability on both skype and talkatone(google voice) are not consistent.
If I'm dropping my landline and want to use just cell phones then I need consistency. Call quality I can sacrifice a bit.
For instance I was a passenger today and my brother called me on my google voice number. Since I was a passenger in the car I'm assuming when moving both skype and any other app can't provide reliability. We couldn't hear eachother and got frustrated and hung up and called him back on att voice.
So I'm looking for reliability.
I tried Skype in which I have an unltd USA calling plan for 2.95/month; skype inbound number and recently Talkatone with Google Voice(unltd USA calls with inbound number)
I'm not sure if it's the apps or att 3G but call quality and reliability on both skype and talkatone(google voice) are not consistent.
If I'm dropping my landline and want to use just cell phones then I need consistency. Call quality I can sacrifice a bit.
For instance I was a passenger today and my brother called me on my google voice number. Since I was a passenger in the car I'm assuming when moving both skype and any other app can't provide reliability. We couldn't hear eachother and got frustrated and hung up and called him back on att voice.
So I'm looking for reliability.
Well, I'm pretty sure that 911 has to be able to be called from a phone even if it does not have a phone service being paid for the line (Though maybe I'm just thinking cellphones but I thought this was for all phones).
So you could just not pay for a landline and still have cord phone in your house solely for 911 calls.
Why can you just not use your cell phones? Why Skype? Why Google Voice? Why anything other than your current cell phone numbers? Why couldn't your brother call you directly on your cell phone? You are redirecting other numbers there, so I assume it's reliable.
Well because we have 4 lines on family plan and will be using alot more minutes than the 700 shared we have now. ATT unlimited voice is expensive.
I get a great discount of 25% off on cell phone so I might take the suggestion of upgrading to 1400 minutes and using my GV number in my a-list.