You can enjoy the convenience of a whole-house phone line without shelling out your hard earned money to your local telecommunications provider. Read on as we show you how to ditch the phone bill, keep the land line, and enjoy free local and long distance calling in the process.
How VoIP Differs from a Traditional Land Line
There are three ways you can pipe phone service into your home: a traditional land line setup through your local phone provider, a cell-phone bridge that extends your cellular plan to your home phone system, and a Voice-over-IP (VoIP) system that uses your Internet connection to bridge your home phone system to a VoIP provider that routes your phone calls back out to the regular telephone grid. But most versions of these plans are expensive:
- Traditional Land Lines: Traditional land line setups are generally expensive for what you get. Basic packages run around $15 a month and don’t include regional or national long distance calling, or amenities like caller ID. Adding in a modest long distance package and those amenities can easily push the price of a standard land line above $40-50 a month. Traditional phone service includes a host of taxes, regulatory fees, and other charges that can easily add $15 to your bill. All told, a single land line with basic long distance features can easily run you $60+ a month.
- Cellphones: Bridging your cellphone plan to your home phone system—whether via a special device provided by your cell company or with a home phone that supports Bluetooth linking—is also expensive, as you generally need to purchase a second line on your cell plan and/or potentially add extra minutes with an upgraded plan to cover the home phone usage. For most people, this would add on anywhere from $10-40 on their already pricey cellphone plan. Like traditional land lines, cellphone lines also incur taxes and regulatory fees. In addition the viability of this method is based on cellular reception. Get bad service in your home? Bridging your cellphone to your home phone isn’t going to fix that.
- Voice-over-IP Systems: VoIP is the newest method of linking your home phone system to the outside world and varies wildly in terms of service quality and price. Many Internet Service Providers (ISPs) now bundle VoIP calling with their internet package—in fact, AT&T and Verizon are aggressively pushing customers towards VoIP systems—but the price of the add-on phone service is routinely as expensive as a traditional land line ($30-40). Depending on the provider, VoIP services may or may not collect taxes and regulatory fees—generally, if your VoIP service is bundled with your internet and/or cable service provided by a traditional telecommunications company, you will be paying the additional fees just like you would with a land line or cellphone.
If you stick with a traditional land line, a cellphone bridge, or a VoIP system provided by your phone company or ISP, phone service will cost you anywhere between $200-600 annually—money we would all certainly be happy to spend on other things. None of that sounds particularly appealing if you’re looking to add some breathing room to your budget. Fortunately, with a small investment up front you can reduce your monthly home phone bill all the way to $0 per month (and mere $1 a month if you want to add in 911 service). All you need is a VoIP adapter and a free Google Voice account. Sound good? You bet it does; let’s get started.
Small Business Owner or Power User? Try a Cloud VoIP Service
The rest of this tutorial explains how to use Google Voice and plug in a traditional home phone, but if you’re running a small business out of your house, or you’re just a user that wants a more powerful solution that’s also easier to setup, you might want to look at one of the many cloud-based VoIP services like RingCentral MVP.
RingCentral has all of the features you’d expect that make VoIP so great—there are apps for iPhone and Android, physical phones for your desk, call waiting, auto attendants, extensions, audio recording, conference calling, voicemail to email, and integrations with Microsoft, Google, Box, Dropbox, and more. You can even get an 800 number if you want to. Click here to learn more.
And their plans start at $20 per month with a free trial period, but can scale up into large businesses if you ever needed to. RingCentral is the phone system that we’ve been using here at How-To Geek for the last few years, and it’s really worth a look.
