I am fed up with our cable company and no longer see the point of paying $90/ month for TV and $35/month for their phone service. I think I’m going with Hulu live TV. I do want to keep my landline, and am wondering whether others have used VOIP providers and have you been happy with the quality?
We have Magic Jack as our “home phone” and the quality is pretty bad. Lots of lag and echo and people on the other end tell us it sounds bad or they call us and it doesn’t ring. We suffer through. Part of the problem might be our weak computer and/or poor quality wireless network. In my den I have an Obi device that I use with Google Voice (The device was cheap and there is no monthly fee) that actually works much better. Sound quality is decent and international calling rates are very reasonable.
We have our landline bundled with DSL for the computer. It’s all of $40 a month. Regular phone…not VOIP.
I’m thinking about trying Ooma. I’m not even sure we have DSL available to us. There is only one competitor to Cablevision in our atea, and that carrier has an abysmal reputation.
Also looking at 1-VOIP
We have Vonage, that we pay about $40 a month for. We have it because my mother in law has stubbornly refused to learn how to use a computer. She wants to be able to be able to pick up her phone and call us like an old “hard line.” One thing very nice is that Vonage gave us two boxes. We have one in our apartment here in Asia, and one in our house in the states. We call Vonage to switch boxes depending on where we are and have the same phone number in both places. It is very clear, just like using a good old fashioned hard line in the days when hard lines were good.
The only reason we keep our landline is because it reduces our DSL cost.
We do not have cable for anything. We ditched them over a year ago and got an awesome antenna, use a ROKU stick…and can get monthly just about anything else via Sling. Don’t miss cable at all.
Using ooma for over 7 years, quality is good and I have a fast internet line. I have their primium service for less than $10 so that when the phone rings, my cell phone rings as well. So, I normally only have to give out only the ooma’s number and I can receive calls on my cell phone if I am not home.
I was just researching ooma today. I heard about it on “Clark Howard”. My phone company which provides my internet and cable just upped my bill another 15%. Ooma is a Voip. The sell you their box which connects to your modem/router and your phone lines connects to it. It is free though you will need to pay any government fees and taxes which for us means $4.09 per month. The basic service includes Call Waiting, Voice Mail and 911. As @artloverplus mentioned they have a premium service which allows you to block numbers. I suspect we will be trying this out. Our landline is getting less and less use and most of the calls we receive are calls we don’t want. For $4.09/month it might be worth hanging on to.
Yeah… I researched Ooma and am probably going to go with their premium service. My only hesitation is that apparently they have pretty aggressive billing practices in that it’s very difficult to get them to stop charging you if you discontinue service. Also one person complained that they actually lost their phone number a few months in – it was “reassigned to another phone company.” I would hate to lose my home phone number of 20 years. But then I have to believe that was a fluke.
@thumper1 - that is exactly what I am planning to do. I ordered a Roku stick and will either do Sling TV or Hulu, leaning toward the latter as you also get all their on demand stuff plus dvr.
Also I double-checked and the only competition for Cablevision is Frontier. I keep researching them and can’t find a single person with anything good to say about them.
We had Charter Cable. They are awful too.
We didn’t want VOIP because we are the only ones on our small street with a wired land line. During the big snowstorm, and hurricane Sandy…we also were the only ones with any phone service. So everyone used our phone to let folks know they were OK…and we als could check the outages schedule with the electric company.
I know it seems silly…but no one else had phones…as the cell towers were out…and so was the internet.
Anyone using OBitalk with Google Voice?
yes, that’s what I mentioned above. Sound quality is pretty good, and after you pay $40 or $50 or even $99 for the Obi device, there are no monthly fees at all. Even international rates are very reasonable.
I have bought 2 Obis but prefer Ooma over them. With Ooma you can have several phones linked up throughout the house and it resembles the old fashioned phone line the most. I’ve used Ooma for many years and love the sound quality and ease of use especially when cell reception wasn’t great at my house many years ago.
Oh, sorry, @NJres, missed that before!
Are you guys speaking English?
The current cable bundle we have includes phone, but I have yet to port over our landline phone #.
Ooma is excellent. I was reluctant but H’s sister had it and we did the switch. That $4 a month fee is worth it.