A year ago I converted our landline over to Vonage. It was about the same price as our existing landline from a CLEC, but brought with it more features and a pretty cool advantage of sticking it to the man… or at least that what the Vonage commercials let you believe.
Fast forward to this month. I’ve dumped Vonage, mainly because they couldn’t fix a simple problem of routing a call to my in-laws’ house across town who also had Vonage. We also have cellphones with unlimited voice and texting, so the landline wasn’t really necessary anymore. I did want to keep our home number, so I hit the Google and found a great resource on how to “port” my home landline number to Google Voice. There are a ton of resources from others online who have done it – so I won’t copy their hard work. I’ll just let you know I used an AT&T GoPhone for $25 to get my number away from Vonage.
Once the number was in AT&T Wireless’ database – it was ripe for porting to Google Voice. Another $20 to port it. So now I’m 1.2 months worth of Vonage to get my number to a cloud service.
Exactly 24 hours after I paid my 20 bucks, Google emails me and let’s me know they have it. Two days later, Vonage send me a goodbye email. I still changed my method of payment over to my empty Paypal debit card so they couldn’t charge me beyond my last month.
Now comes the tricky part. Fooling your family and friends.
By default, Google Voice will screen your calls. This means that anyone that calls you will get the Google Voice attendant asking “After the beep, please state your name… BEEEEP” then the caller is put on hold while GV rings you and announces the call. It’s quite an ordeal if your grandma calls you and has no clue what this chick is asking and why?
Update your contacts in GMail and/or Google Voice. Make sure the numbers are correct and group your friends into a friends group, family into a family group, etc. Then you can set up group based rules. Like family rings right through – no screening. Friends ring my cell during the day and only Google Talk at night.
Oh, and if you need to make outbound calls from your home number – use the Google Voice app on your cell, calls inside the US are 100% free and it only uses data. You can even call from your browser if you have a decent headset or use your laptop as a speaker phone. I pay about $4/mo to Skype to let me call from my tablet, computer, or cell to landline phones – Google Voice is going to save me the $4 now.
Total savings: $4/mo Skype, $39/mo Vonage Unlimited… so $516/year… which pays for one of my extra iPhone lines outright.
If I ever need to light up my home landline again, I’ll just get one of these.