With Evan in college, and two more headed that way, I started thinking of ways to reduce various recurring costs. Maybe it was the Frontier / AT&T phone bill that arrived several months ago. I have both a home telephone line as well as a business line for work. Both together run almost $70 a month, excluding the long distance for my business. While I use the business line constantly, we don't use the old home landline much. The kids use their cellphones (or, more likely, text) and we're not heavy long distance users.
I thought of getting rid of the home line altogether. But, Karen likes the convenience of picking up any too-many-phones we have in the house, and, since we've had the same home phone number forever, all of our friends have it memorized or on speed dial. Plus, all the doctors, dentists, schools, credit card companies, employers, etc etc, all have it on file. So, no cutting the cord.
But, modern technology being what it is, it's now possible to make all of your calls over the internet on the cheap, bypassing old Ma Bell. Want caller-id or call-forwarding without paying an arm and a leg? No problem.
If you're a real geek, you might use Skype or GoogleVoice. But, maybe you want to plug in your good old phone - the one with handsets all of the house - or keep your old number or have 911 service. So, the trick is to blend the various technologies together to yield something that, at its simplest, is a black-box equivalent of the old service, but yet is dirt cheap and offers lots of advanced services (we'll get to those later).
First, after some research on voip (Voice Over IP) providers, I signed up with voip.ms, a Canadian company with some positive buzz. They offer cheap per minute rates (a shade over a cent a minute). But, the kicker is they charge only $1.40 / month for a number ported to their service (which is a $25 one time cost to move your number from your existing phone company to voip.ms. Taxes? Nada. Regulatory fees? Nope. 911 service? Sure, only $1.50 a month.
So, now we have a VOIP carrier instead of Ma Bell. But, we still have to a means to talk and listen without using the computer, a gadget that on one end plugs into our internet cable modem, and on the other end allows to plus in the good old house phone. Enter the Obi.
The Obi110 (aka, the OBi110 Voice Service Bridge and VoIP Telephone Adapter) is a cheap device (about $50 on Amazon) that allows these connections (plus a connection to the good old telco network). While it can do a lot more, it allows to hook everything together in a complete system that works almost like the original one.
So, let's recap - $3 a month fixed cost, plus whatever the variable amount based on how much we talk. Which is likely to be about $3-4 a month. But, the nice thing about voip.ms services is you can do all sorts of interesting tricks for no added cost. Caller ID and call forwarding - easy. Voicemail - no problem. Call blocking - yup. How about a "digital receptionist?" (ie, "press 1 to leave a message, press 2 to ring Karen's cell phone, press 3 to ring Don's phone mail") - now we are starting to get interesting. How about if one of the kids calls the home number from their cell phone, if no one answers the phone, ring both Karen and my cell phone simultaneously - neat. And we've just scratched the surface.
So, why wouldn't a lot of folks do this? Well, a lot of hacks already have. And, that's the point. The technology and its integration remind me of the old peer-to-peer music sharing services before the advent of iTunes. x10. Rolling your own service is mostly beyond the abilities of a non-techie. Ooma is probably the closest to making this an easy to use plug and play service (like iTunes did to music), but the entry price is somewhat expensive at around $200. But if you want to add the advanced services that are free with voip.ms, you'll pay Ooma an additional $10/month.
But, this is the future, and I sure wouldn't want to be a traditional local phone company whose services will one day dry up.
