Residential VoIP Phone Service

[Barry]

Has anyone used a residential VoIP phone service that you would recommend? I had very good results with RingCentral for my business lines before I retired, but they don't really have a residential package.

We had AT&T Plain Old Telephone Service (aka, POTS or twisted copper pair) for our home number for 30+ years. I finally fired them a couple of years ago and switched our home alarm system to "cellular monitoring" and switched our home telephone number to Verizon Wireless Home Phone service. The Verizon service is basically a cell phone in a box with a RJ11 jack for an analog phone. The price was right ($20 / month instead of $55 / month with AT&T) and it worked OK for a while, but eventually started exhibiting pretty severe audio breakup. Verizon Wireless doesn't have a solution, so I am thinking about Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) service. I have a good internet connection, so that should not be an issue.

Any recommendations or warnings would be appreciated.

 

[belmateo]

Most VOIP phones fail to work during a power outage even though there is a backup battery in place. Just about everyone has cut the cord on a landline in the house.
Does your Inernet Provider offer one?
For me it is not worth the....
Cost
Limited usage
A doorway for Telemarketers.
Mobile phones do it all and you can call anywhere in the country with no "Long Distance Charges"

 

[Barry]

I appreciate that there is no reason to have a home phone, but SWMBO has a different opinion. The issue is not if, why or why not; the issue is how.

 

[Warren]

There is a reason to have a home phone if you live in a dead area, or cell traffic just gets so bad that you can't make a phone call. Dan aka SPMDR
Has a maggot jack I mean magicJack, certainly never heard him praise it

 

[Alpine 1789]

FWIW, I had a VOIP line via my cable company; my bill was actually lower if I had the line. The quality was fine, but we never used it. We probably paid for it for a year without even having a phone connected before finding a new package that didn't automatically include it.

 

[Barry]

Thought a follow-up might be useful to someone.

I went with 1-VoIP (https://www.1-voip.com/). I chose the Value 500 Residential Plan which includes unlimited incoming calls and 500 minutes / month of outbound calls to the U.S. and Canada. Setup cost (including the ATA box which goes between our home phone system and my network router) was $25.44 and the monthly charge is $8.97. No contract required.

Porting our home number to 1-VoIP took a couple of extra days because Verizon made it as difficult as possible. The call quality is very good and there have been zero robocalls in about 10 days compared to several per day with Verizon. 1-VoIP has excellent U.S. based customer service.

I will update this if there are any problems down the road.

 

[dwolff706]

Thanks for posting this Barry, useful information and comments.
Dave

 

[belmateo]

Barry,
That sounds like a really good deal. I went to their website looking for a definition of the "Features" but it is not broken down anywhere. Did you get things like Call Waiting, Call Forwarding, Caller Id etc.?

 

[Barry]

The "Features" are described at https://www.1-voip.com/residential-voip-features.php. The "home phone service" is mostly for SWMBO and I have not yet activated many of the advanced features. After I log-in, the account status and features are front and center.

The 1-voip customer service reps are very knowledgeable and willing to explain how the stuff works, even if you are just window shopping.

 

[belmateo]

Thanks Barry,
That helps alot!

 

[Bill Tippy]

We had Vonage and were very happy with it.
It was especially useful for us. We lived in Germany for 3 years, so we simply took our device with us, connected to the internet, and tada, we had our phone and the same phone number.