Net phone hookup can save money
By Kim Komando
Using your computer and Internet connection to make phone calls has been getting a lot of attention lately. People are enticed by the savings offered by voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) and the ability to use a regular telephone. Before making the switch, you should weigh the pros and cons.
Most VoIP providers charge a monthly fee of $20 to $30 for unlimited local and long-distance calling anywhere in the United States and sometimes Canada. You also receive features that would normally cost extra, such as call forwarding, voice mail, caller ID and call waiting.
Many providers will also forward your voice mail to an e-mail account. There is a super version of call forwarding that sends calls to five or so different phones.
VoIP service is offered by such companies as AT&T (www.usa.att.com/callvantage), Packet8 (www.packet8.net), VoicePulse (www.voicepulse.com) and Vonage (www.vonage.com). The quality is better than a cell phone's and often matches traditional phone service. But there is a potential for dropped calls, similar to cell-phone service.
(In Hawai'i, both Oceanic Time Warner Cable at oceanic.com and Verizon Hawaii at verizon.com offer flat-rate long-distance and local phone service using a broadband Internet connection.)
To get started, you'll need a broadband connection such as cable or DSL. That's because your voice is translated into data and takes up quite some bandwidth.
You can talk on the phone while using the Internet. To do that, you'll need a router. Both the computer and the phone connect to the router. This is no different than networking two or more computers.
The telephone connects to the Internet with an adapter, supplied for free or a nominal fee by the VoIP provider. The whole thing is not as simple as plugging a phone into a jack, but it's fairly painless.
If you've had the same phone number for 20 years, you probably can keep it. But the switchover can take days or sometimes weeks. During the transition, you may want to have two phones, one connected to the Internet and the other the traditional service. You can make outbound calls on the Internet, but take inbound calls over the traditional service.
Signing up with a new number has advantages. Most service providers allow you to choose any area code. You also can use the area code you live in for your main number and add a second phone number with a different area code for a nominal fee (about $5). This second number would ring on the same phone. If you live in Seattle but most of your friends and family live in Chicago, they could call you for free.
With all of these advantages, there are some serious drawbacks.
Setting up extension phones is difficult. You can connect a cordless telephone to the adapter and then purchase expansion handsets (about $70 each) for use in other rooms. Or, if you want to continue using the phone jacks installed in your house, you can hire an electrician to do some rewiring.
In many cases, Internet connections to 911 are difficult or impossible. You may have to dial police or fire departments directly.
Nonetheless, VoIP offers some real benefits. If you spend a lot of time on long-distance, for instance, and can accept its shortcomings, you can save money.
