I ran into a site today that looks kind of interesting. Basically, it's internet telephony.
You hook a box to your broadband connection, and then hook your regular phone to the box. A phone number is assigned to the box, and when people call you, the phone hooked to the box rings. You can also hook the box to existing home wiring, so all of your home phones work.
Why is this interesting? -- Well, apart from being technically cool, it includes long distance charges. The Unlimited Local/Regional package is $25, and includes 500 long distance minutes. Long distance beyond the 500 minutes is 3.9 cents per minute. The service includes Caller ID and Voicemail, which can be accessed via phone, web, or email.
Ok, that's not all that remarkable. But these features are:
For $5 more a month, you can get a virtual phone number. Imagine a number in the 814 area code that rang at our house. It wouldn't cost long distance for Berta's family to call, and it would only cost us $5 per month.
We can move the phone box. Say we go on vacation. If we take the phone adapter with us and plug it into the hotel's broadband connection, we can make and receive calls on our home phone line (at regular non-long-distance costs) just as if we were sitting at home.
Their Simul-ring feature makes it so that when someone calls our number, the home phone rings AND another phone of our choosing rings. If we're away from home, we can have it ring a cell-phone, and take our calls there.
The service is pretty neat. I wonder if it would get rid of the fuzziness on the phone line. Cost would be interesting to compare. If we dropped everything but basic pay-per-call phone service and DSL on our home phone (we would still need the broadband), we might be able to save a little money using Vonage, and get some of the extra services.
Anyway, I thought it was kind of interesting.
