When Kathleen and I decided to move to Newtown, Pennsylvania, we decided that we were going to move as aggressively into the new age of telecommunications as possible. At the most basic level, this meant that all telephone service for the house and the Home Office would use Voice over IP instead of standard telephone lines. Standard phone lines are sometimes known as POTS lines for Plain Old Telephone Service.
In our old place in East Windsor, NJ, we had five POTS lines: four lines that fed into our Panasonic Digital Super Hybrid Phone System which we bought four years ago from Ablecomm and one line that was an office fax line and carried the Verizon DSL service. This system was intended to allow us to:
- run a single phone system for the house and the Home Office,
- answer any phone line on the system via any phone set in the house, and
- operate our own programmable voice mail system.
This was a good idea when I got a lot of incoming calls when I was in the office. A lot more of my business is transacted over email and IM than the phone today, and I need good phone service more often when I’m out of the office than when I’m at my desk. This is a big reason why I bought myself a Treo 650.
The first step in making this switch actually took place before we decided to move. Back in March, Kathleen and I each bought Treo 650s with unlimited mobile data service. We did this because it allowed us to access our email from anywhere and reduce our overall telecom bills by shifting a lot of our calling to free Cingular Mobile to Mobile calling which is free under our billing plans.
The intent after we got our Treo 650s was to reduce the number of POTS lines we had installed in East Windsor to the minimum necessary to operate our phone system, but it never happened because we subsequently focused on Kathleen’s job search and then a search for a new house.
During the new house search we came to depend upon our Treos. We were able to call, email, and look at the web from the front seat of our car. This is really helpful when you are house hunting. Eventually we realized that we don’t need our home phone for too much anymore, other than as a place for people to leave messages for us. This pushed us even harder in the direction of VoIP.
When we committed to moving to Newtown, I began doing research to see if I could get “naked DSL” at the new house. I eventually settled on Speakeasy OneLink because it was a high speed DSL service that didn’t require a regular phone line and I could combine OneLink with Speakeasy VoIP/Home under one bill.
I went with Speakeasy for all of my telecom needs for the Home Office because their VoIP service was a fairly unique offering. Since they have a nationwide broadband network, they are able to manage traffic on that network to prioritize VoIP traffic. This means they can guarantee Quality of Service all along their network, where VoIP carriers that don’t own a broadband network have limited ability to manage QoS.
I’ve asked friends who know about VoIP if they can tell that I’m calling them using one of my Speakeasy VoIP lines. None of them could tell we were on a VoIP call until I told them.
The price we’re paying for Speakeasy VoIP/Home is $23.95 per month per line for unlimited calling in the USA and Canada. That’s where the real savings is for us compared to our Verizon service when we were in East Windsor. We paid about $31.22 per residential line with nothing but local calls, so local toll calls and long distance added to that. Speakeasy VoIP/Home is also price competitive with Vonage, which prices unlimited calling in the USA and Canada at $24.00 per month.
At some point I’m going to try to come up with a telecommunications cost comparison, illustrating all of the services we paid for in East Windsor and what we substituted them with Newtown. In the meantime, I recommend that you take a look at Glenn Fleishman’s telecom package choices and itemized list of charges. He didn’t make the same choices we made, but the magnitude of his savings was one of the things that influenced us to take a look at switching to VoIP in the first place.
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