Finance Q&A

Looking for new home telephone service ?

Q. Just moved and am looking for home telephone service that is reliable and inexpensive. Any of you been there and done that recently? Would appreciate your experiences in finding and using alternative home telephone service providers.

A. Local telephone company is usually the most reliable, but a close second will be the cable company and they are usually cheaper. One weird but cool thing about the sunrocket.com VOIP service is that you can take it with you and use it anywhere where you have high-speed Internet access -- same phone number, same unlimited calling, etc. So, if you go on vacation somewhere for 2 weeks, and have Internet access there, you can bring your phone service with you and it works. The online problem is that the 9-1-1 address location that you set up for calls from your home stays the same. In other words, if you call 9-1-1 while on vacation, the call-taker will see your home address info on his/hers computer screen. AT&T's VOIP service sucks ass in my brother in law's experience. The fun of fingerpointing at his broadband internet provider when the inbound telephone number goes right to voicemail instead of ringing in the house. You'll be very hard pressed to beat the reliability of the plain ole telephone network. And be prepared for the phone not to work in times when you'd like it most to work (i.e. power outages). I was there last year and am still doing it. I decided to go with DSL service, and the standard phone service for $18 (not counting the DSL of course). I started off with caller ID on the phone but decided that it wasn't worth the $9 they charged for it. I actually looked in to getting a VoIP phone (and still may do that), but since I live in Georgia, I still have to pay for the $18 (plus "fees") land line even if I don't have the phone line. Otherwise it cost about $15 MORE with just DSL and no phone line. I looked into Comcast (digital voice), but my house doesn't exist on their network, so they can't give me service. Of course, neighbors on all three sides of me are in their system, but they are still working on sending someone out to "check on it". That was a year ago. we use our cell phone a bunch since most of the people we talk to are "IN" the network. Caller ID is free on that ironically. So is long distance. Not dependent on internet service either. I vote cell phone. Check with neighbors about what picks up best in the area.