Rebelling with VOIP

My local phone company has a a true monopoly on communications services in the county. This company is the only provider of phone, DSL and cable service. It's a small, local company and apparently not subject to the same regulation as the big provider in the area, BellSouth.

I hate the fact that there's no competition and my home phone bill, with little long distance, averages $75/month. I hate the fact that they control cable, too, and the line up is predominately sports and shopping and (with HBO) costs me $59.00 a month to get fraction of the channels I used to get in the Chicago suburbs, for about the same money. And, I hate that my cable modem costs are $10 more monthly than I paid in the Chicago area or with Time Warner not five miles away (across the county and state line).

So, I've decided to rebel. But, I'm starting slowly by testing the waters of some newer technology.

Last week, I took AT&T up on their offer for Voice over IP (VoIP) services called CallVantage. It connects directly to my broadband (cable) connection and I make the calls over the Internet connection. It offers all of the same services that I currently have with my local company, plus a few other cool things like sending my voice mail messages to my email box, and personal conference calls with up to 10 participants. You can choose from a number pretty much anywhere in the US (except in my case, I can't get a number in the local exchange because of the monopoly I spoke of earlier--I ended up with a Charlotte number because it's not long distance for the local calling area, but still a "local-like number".) All for the low price of $34.95/month for unlimited local and long distance calling. There's even an special deal now...$19.95/month for the first six months, no sign-up fees and a free VoIP telephone adapter (TA).

I signed up last week, and earlier this week I received the TA with simple, easy to follow instructions. I was connected within 10 minutes and using the number for out-going calls. I'm still having a problem with incoming calls getting a "This line is not in service message" (which I think has to do with setting up the number locally--AT&T is working on this now). Otherwise it works great. The line quality is equal to my local phone company's lines and there's no noticeable degradation in my broadband access speeds.

I still have my local line, but if this test of VoIP for the next 30-days pans out, I'm cutting loose the local company. I'll save money and start a very personal rebellion against their monopoly.

I'll be writing more about my experiences in the coming weeks. Stay tuned.

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