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The Switch to Vonage VoIP Phone Service is Saving me $65/mo March 2, 2006


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In the beginning of the year, we decided to really look at our fixed expenses, and see where we can cut down on costs. This is where I got the 2006 Savings Tracker idea (see right sidebar).

Cutting Phone Costs

One area we thought we could do better was on our landline phone costs. We had a land line phone bill from Verizon and our long distance carrier was MCI. We don’t use our phone much at home. We make a few local calls a day, and make calls to our family in the USA and Cananda once or twice a week for about 20 minutes. We rarely make overseas calls. Despite that, our phone bill (local + long distance) averaged $70. We didn’t have any added options such as caller ID or multiple phone lines.

We decided to go with VoIP. a broadband phone service by Vonage. Any VoIP phone provider requires that you have a broadband (either DSL or Cable ISP) connection to the Internet. Since we already had cable connection, we didn’t have to get extra broadband service. Vonage has two residential
calling plans: $14.99/month for 500 minutes, $24.99/month for unlimited minutes to USA/Canada/Mexico. We chose the $14.99 plan.

Savings: $70 - $15 = $65 / month

Set Up

The set up was very easy. Everything was set up online with a few online forms. It took 5 minutes to sign up for the service, which included account creation, automatic cc payments, and existing phone number transfer. Vonage takes care of the phone number transfer and took about 2 weeks for our current number to transfer to Vonage. We chose to have the Vonage device (router) sent to us via air mail (vs. buy one at a retail store). We received the router in 3 days. Vonage provided a temporary ‘virtual’ number for us to use until the existing number completed transfer. vonage even takes care of cancelling your existing phone line contracts with Verizon and MCI.

Usage / Quality

When I received the router, I set it up on my home wireless network. The sound quality was as good as a regular phone line, but it dropped about one call per day. This was annoying. So I tried connecting the Vonage router directly to the cable modem router, which solved the dropped call problem. But our cable modem sits in our basement, which means that the only phone jack is in the basement. Since we don’t have a huge home, we plugged in a cordless phone into the Vonage router jack and put the extension cordless phone in the kitchen.

Final Verdict

Pros:

Cons:

Next Bracket Recomments Vonage the Broadband Phone Company. If you’d like to sign up, please click on the Vonage logo. If you have any questions, feel free to post a comment or contact me.

Comments»

1. Next Income Bracket » My Definition of the 10% Rule - April 20, 2006

[…] Does saving on your 401k retirement count towards your savings? I’ve always trained my mind that anything put into my 401k is just money never seen. I don’t count it towards savings, net worth, etc. So when I do get to see it someday, it’ll be found money. So in my book, when people say we should save at least 10% of our salary, I see it as 10% of my after-tax, discretionary money. I’ve been able to do that without any major lifestyle changes by changing small habits, and reducing my fixed costs. From a MSN Money article, the savings picture in the US is pretty bleak: In 1981, families saved an average of 11% and owed 4% of their income on credit cards. By 2000, the average savings rate had already fallen below zero, and credit-card debt had gone up to 12% of income. Today, she says, “boomers have a bigger problem with debt than anyone else. Half of them do not have a retirement account.” […]