Phone service for your home can be extremely expensive, especially if you live in a rural area like I do. On top of that the monopoly telephone companies make it extremely hard to know what you are paying (in state, out of state, out of you mind!). Now, some people have dropped their home phone all together in favor of cell only service, but I do not recommend this option since 911 services still do not work nearly as well on cell phones as they do on land line service. Instead, try these two alternative ways to save money on your home phone.
1. Only use your home phone for local calls and emergencies.
This works mostly for people who do not talk on the phone a lot. With the way people move around these days you likely have friends and family that are long distance from you. This means you are stuck using a calling card or your wireless for these calls. Personally I find calling cards to be a pain and heaven forbid you go over the minutes on your cell phone (35, 40, 45 cents a minute anyone?). This can, however, be a really viable option with certain types of cell phone plans and I will be covering wireless plans in part two of this series tomorrow.
2. Switch to a VOIP service
VOIP stands for voice over Internet protocol. Basically you use the Internet to make your calls. There are two types of voip: software based and hardware based.
The biggest player in software base voip is Skype . Skype is cheap at only $3 per month for unlimited local and long distance but it is also not e911 capable so it doesn’t really solve the problem with giving you the best emergency service and you are tethered to a computer, making all of your calls from a computer headset.
Hardware based Voip offers many options when it comes to providers. Vonage is the big dog in the hardware based voip arena and they have really broken the ground for all the other players when it comes to public acceptance of the technology. With this form of voip you use a voip router to generate phone service. It looks like a small box with two or more network ports. One port connects to your high speed internet connection, the other to your computer(s). The advantages to hardware voip is that you can keep your current phone number, it is e911 capable, comes with all the perks (unlimited long distance, voice mail, caller id, call waiting, etc.), you can use the phones that you currently have in your house, at $25 per month it is reasonably inexpensive , and the hardware is easily tied into your house wiring so everything acts the same as before. The downside is that not all the carriers are customer service oriented and if there is a problem you may have to wade through the mess yourself.
Personally, being someone who talks on the phone a lot, I use hardware based voip. I have very few problems with the technology and the calls are very clear. I also like that if I have an emergency that I can be located quickly and, most of all, I don’t have to listen to people tell me I am going to get cancer from my cell phone. On Wednesday, in the final part of this series, I will give reviews on some of the different voip companies out there.
Cell Phones
I actually worked for one of the major cell phone providers for five years. During that time I saw countless people over paying for their services and getting charged extra fees for things they were using that were outside of their plan. After I left the wireless industry I always had friends asking for my help. So, I developed these three questions to help people know what they needed and if they were wasting money.
Are you with the right carrier? To determine this you need to know the carrier of the people you talk to the most, because all providers offer free mobile to mobile inside of their network. For instance in my scope of friends and family almost everyone is with the same carrier (mostly because I sold them their phones). It would be crazy for me to leave this company because I would use a tremendous number of minutes talking to the people I talk to most.
Can you understand your bill? If you cannot understand your bill, go down to the retail store owned by you provider and talk to a rep. DO NOT CALL CUSTOMER CARE!!! Why? They are terrible. No provider has good call center help. NONE! One will pop up with the best rating but being the best of the failures still makes you a failure. Also, once you find someone at a store that is helpful always go to that person, always buy your accessories from them, send your friends to them and always make any changes, especially new phones, with that person. These people are on commission and they will go to the mat for you if you make them money consistently. This includes “bending” the service plans to help you.
And the final question is, what features do you need? Do you: like to text message (more importantly does your son or daughter text message), go online with your phone, talk in the evening, make international calls, etc., etc. These are important things to know. This is also an area where having someone at the store help you look at your bill is invaluable.
The only other thing you must remember is that when your contract is up it is time for your provider to pay the piper. DO NOT SELL AWAY YOUR NEGOTIATING POWER FOR ONLY A NEW PHONE! Everyone gets a new phone after a certain amount of time. If you pay your bill every month you are a valuable customer and thus deserve the perks of being loyal. What are those perks? There are too many to list, butyou should know there is a code in every cell phone carriers system for every possible contingency. All you need to know is what they are, walk in, and ask for it. You are going to have to research a little but you will find that there are forums about each of the major carriers. Just go to Google and type in your carriers name followed by the word “users”. With that the forums for you cell phone company will pop up and there will be a section with people bragging about their plan. Just go in find one that fits you and ask for that plan in exchange for a new contract. It may take some persistence but you will get the results you want.
VOIP Service
VOIP has been around a little more than ten years now. It started out as a service you could only use through a computer. As times have changed so has voip. Now you can get the service and use it pretty much anywhere in the world. A standalone voip router can be connected anywhere you travel and give you a US phone number. Most voip companies charge $24.95 per month for unlimited local and long distance along with all the fun options that normally cost extra on your land line (voice mail, caller id, 3-way calling, call waiting, call forwarding, speed dial, and call blocking whew!).
The next thing to know is if your Internet providers network will give a good clear call. The best place to test is www.testyourvoip.com. This site will actually make a test call and give you a rating on the call quality. If you get an extremely low rating why even bother continuing down this path. Most likely your Internet provider is not taking good care of their network. I would even consider switch to a different ISP. However, if the test passes you have many options on where to get phone service.
Choosing a company is not usually too complicated. Most cable providers are trying to package phone with television and high speed Internet. This can lead to big savings but watch out for promotions that only last a certain period of time. You will usually pay a little more for the cable companies service, but if something is wrong they also have control of the network and can usually fix the problem. As far as I have seen, all of the cable provider services are e911 capable. So cable company pro: customer service con: price
The other option to look at is an independent provider. They are plentiful and hard to sort through except for a few main players. Vonage has about 50% of the voip market but they are losing customers all the time because you have to hunt through message boards to find a customer service phone number. The company that gets some of the best ratings is, surprisingly, AT&T. Apparently Ma Bell wants to curb attrition and is willing to jump in with a competitive service called CallVantage. There are many others that offer great rates including: Packet 8, ViaTalk, Connect Voip, and on and on. I used to be a proponent of the smaller companies because their pricing is more competitive, but just in the last couple of months one of the biggest low cost providers, Sun Rocket, went out of business. It was not pretty. One day people had service and the next no dial tone. The most painful part of this debacle was that Sun Rocket was able to give great deals by having people prepay. So if you prepaid 3 months before hand for a year of service you were just out of luck. For this reason I only recommend the big companies or voip providers that are tied to another business (cable TV, Internet provider, etc.). Always read the fine print from independent providers to make sure they are e911 capable. Pro: Price Con: possibly customer service, but maybe not
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