A little while ago I decided to figure out how to reduce my outrageous telecommunications bill as much as I could. I was off my promotional Verizon FIOS plan and my bill had hit around $120 something a month for my Triple Play TV, landline, and cable TV. Since I hardly watched any TV and made very few phone calls this was way too much money. I was able to move to an all Internet plan with higher speeds and which allowed more devices at home and jettisoned TV and phone and wound up at $69.99 / month for Verizon. Not great but the best I could with limited broadband competition in Massachusetts. I replaced the phone with Internet telephony I looked at a bunch of different options and found a great little known option that cut my telephone bill to around $3.50 per month.
Voip.ms is not one of the big names in internet telephony like Vonage or Ooma but I’ve found their service to be great. It’s cheaper than the big names, the quality sounds great, the up-time has been great, and they have tons of cool features, like blacklists, voicemail, multiple lines, SMS and pretty much anything else you can imagine all manageable through their webportal.
I mentiond that it was less expensive than most of the other services I found. I pay $1.50 per month for e911 + $.85 / mo monthly fee for inbound calls and $.01 per minute for inbound calls to the US and calls terminated in the U.S. (charged in 6 second increments). Ooma actually charges a larger minimum ($3.82 for taxes and fees) and in order to get blacklisting you need to pay $9.99 for their premier service. The only advantage is that it is free for their basic service after the minimum unless you talk over 5,000 minutes. In any event I rarely pay more than a $1 in call charges per month so Voip.ms is just a bit chepaer than Ooma on an ongoing basis for me with more functionality that I would use. My hardware with Voip.ms was also cheaper (see below).
One of the things I worried about before moving to Voice over IP telephony was the quality. I worried that it people’s voice would have that weird distortion / breakup that you often here on internet voice chat clients. The call quality sounds exactly like my old wire landline. I have yet to hear break out after months of using the service. Sweet!
You can port your existing landline number to them and importantly, they support e911 so emergency services can know exactly where you are if you make a 911 call. Their website isn’t very pretty but it’s very functional. In fact the amount of control they give you to adjust settings is quite cool. For example, don’t want to get calls anymore from that creepy guy from high school? You can have the system give a number disconnected message when that person calls. Want calls forwarded to another number while your away? Just do it in the portal.
As for support, they have folks you can chat with online or call during business hours and outside of business hours I sent various questions to support via email and they would get back to me within a day with helpful answers to pricing related questions, feature-related questions, and technical setup related questions. One thing that I really like as well is that if they have issues with one of their servers they’ll let you know about it by email. I like that level of customer care even though none of the incidents that occured impacted me direclty.
To connect my cordless telephone base station to my internet router I got the Cisco SPA 112 phone adapter which is currently selling for $29 on Amazon. Compare to $88 for Ooma device.
Happy cord cutting!
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