Bye bye landline. Hello VOIP!

Unlike most people I do not have (nor have I ever had) a cell phone, so a landline at home is my only phone.  However, I've noticed my home phone bill was slowly creeping up each month.  A recently bill was $31.93.  Now this may not sound like a lot, but you have to realize I haven't had a long distance carrier on my home phone for well over 10 years.  So $32 is for the absolutely basic local-only phone package with no additional features.

I started looking into other options and a friend recommended a phone system called Ooma.  Ooma is a VOIP (Voice Over IP) phone - or put simply an Internet phone.  They've been around since 2004 and have really become popular as of the last several years.  The way Ooma works is you buy the Ooma Telo for a one-time fee of $200.  After that all you pay is the federally-mandated monthly taxes which are about $3.50 (they vary depending on where you live).  So for a few bucks a month you get a phone with free unlimited local and long distance calling plus features like caller-Id and voicemail.  Ooma also offers an optional "Premier" account that adds additional features like up to four active phones at one time on the same phone number, three-way calling, integration with Google Voice, etc. for $10/month.

So let's recap.  Old phone with AT&T; local-only, no long distance, no caller-id, about $30/month.  New phone with Ooma, unlimited local and long distance, includes caller-id, about $3/month.  Hmm, seems like a no-brainer to me.

As an added bonus, our DSL Internet got cheaper as well.  Previously DSL cost $43/month, but to drop the phone line AT&T had to cancel the account and create a new DSL-only account, and they signed me up at $25/month for the same speed level.

The hardware cost $200, and it was another $40 to port our existing home phone number to Ooma - but we're saving about $45 a month.  At that rate it's just over 5 months until we break even, and after that it's nothing but savings!

Next time I'll talk about the hardware itself, the sound quality, and my opinions of the system.