Change Can Be Good
Living with Thaddeus (the Luddite), we are required to have a land line for our phone service. Trying to convince him to get rid of the land line and use just a cell phone was a fruitless argument.
Options and Results
He does have a cell phone…it’s a go-phone that he pays $100 a year…for $100 he gets WAY more minutes than he will ever need. In fact, he just completed the annual renewal this month and he has almost twice the number of minutes he started with since he could carry over all his unused minutes (less than 50 minutes of cell phone in a year!) And honestly, we don’t use our home phone very much at all. Since we had to pay for both the local phone line and a monthly rate for long-distance capabilities…we were paying about $50 a month for our land line.
His concerns:
- Didn’t want to lose his home phone number
- Didn’t want to have to carry a cell phone with him all over the house (we currently have a total of six extensions all around the house)
- Preferred the simplicity of a land line
- Replace the land line with a cell phone and get a blue tooth base with cordless remote extensions
so he could leave his cell phone in one place and have extensions all over the house.
- Replace the land line with a box from Verizon called Home Phone Connect
that would allow us to continue to use our existing cordless phones (which costs about $25 a month with a 2 year contract).
- Replace the land line with a cell phone and get a blue tooth base with cordless remote extensions
- Go with Vonage
as one of the more popular Voice Over Internet Protocol services (VoIP).
- Go with Vonage
- Expand our current involvement with Comcast and get their VoIP phone service (initially, it would cost us less than we currently pay per month, but then after a year or two would be more).
- Look at other VOIP options that are cheaper and relatively well rated by users.
