Revisiting this topic to check if any feedback from people who switched to VOIP or other opons
I have concluded that my main concern is keeping the landline home# alive. (I would like a solution like today where phone works without power to the router. But our part of town has buried power lines and almost no power outages, so I have to let go of that worry.).
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I still have my old fashioned land line (hard wired), without long distance service to save money. We just receive calls here, mostly from my 97 year old father. Originally it gave us the best audio quality, but recently it has degraded… for some callers it is VERY crackly.
CenturyLink ran a test and confirmed there is some sort of problem. They would need to send a tech to analyze. If the problem is on their end, they fix. If not, there is a $99 analysis fee charged… and I don’t think that includes finding the inside root cause.
I had been on the verge of going to a VOIP solution with our superb local internet provider. But… now I’m concerned that our 30 year old might have some wiring issues - house handsets might not work well?
One possibility is to just port the home number to our Verizon plan, maybe find a way to forward key numbers to my line.
You can have the number ported to Google Voice which is free. Then you get calls or texts to that number on whatever devices you have the GV app installed on…no matter where you are. In my case, both my phone and my tablet ring at the same time. If I wanted to, I could have calls go to both my and my DH’s phone. The con is that you have to be somewhere you have data. So, if your router is out, but your cell towers are still functioning, you will get the call. If the cell towers are down, or you are traveling somewhere you don’t have cell service, you will not.
I have both a VoIP and a google number (they are different). I got the handset for the ooma VoIP and the sound quality is terrible. But I can listen to any voicemails via the app on my cell. If your goal is to not have call come to your cell, then VoIP is probably better (we rarely answer ours). If you are OK with your cell ringing for 2 numbers, then porting to google voice is a good option. Ooma is about $7/mo but a friend called to cancel and got hers reduced to $3/mo!
I recently switched from a traditional landline to VOIP. I ended up going with Vonage; took under a week to port my existing telephone numbers over from my previous telco (Frontier). The hardware Vonage provides allowed me to keep my existing home telephone equipment and telephone line connection to a security system panel. Have not noticed a change in voice quality from my prior copper line, and we are routing the VOIP through a satellite internet connection (Starlink).
If you’re worried about the telephone wiring in your home being the issue, you could always sign up with a new telephone number and try it out. If no issues, then port your existing number over and dump the temporary line – this is what I did as I was not 100% sold on the VOIP switch at first.
Thanks for the quick info! I can’t go directly from an old wired landline…. would need to first port to an interim VOIP or cellphone service. We’ve procrastinated so long that I wanted to make sure the freebie person google voice idea is still an option for preserving that landline number.
Still pondering which direction to go, but definitely we do want to replace our Centurylink traditional landline ($55/month basic - no long distance, no caller id etc, sound quality not as good as it used to be). We have some reasons that we are keen to keep our home phone number, but it won’t be used much.
Today we ruled out porting our Centurylink# over to our Infinity/Comcast cable plan (extra $27/month +$15 unless we buy our own modem). We did save though by having the clerk reduce by $5/month with 1 year renewal (hubby really wants to keep our TV cable) and $8/month paying by checking/autopay rather than Visa.
If we keep a signicant phone bill, we’d rather pay $37/month to add it to our superb (nationally acclaimed) local utility we use for high speed internet than Infinity. Once we are using VOIP, we could opt to switch to Google voice down the road.
