In Stevie and my “ways to save money” discussions Vonage always comes up as one thing that we could easily do without. We both have cell phones with decent plans and plenty of roll over minutes. However, there were two arguments that I did find in defense of keeping the house line.
First one being that the home phone is better for longer conversations, mainly because it is big enough that you can squeeze it between your shoulder and your ear. However, it is not normal for either of us to engage in long conversations on the phone, so it really isn’t a deal breaker.
The other argument was that it is nice to have a phone number to give to people and businesses that you don’t want to be able to get hold of you all the time. I kept thinking it would be nice to have a local phone number that would simply forward to our cell phones, and for important people it could even ring my work phone. One that we could create rules of who gets forwarded where. That way if a person or business called repeatedly, we could set it up to go straight to voicemail.
It turns out that there is free service that provides just that! It’s name is GrandCentral. We signed up last night and got a local number that we like. Now we are both starting the process of updating everyone with our new number.
In a week or two I plan to cancel our Vonage service, which means we will be saving $17.98 a month. It might seem like a small savings, but when you do the math it does add up to be $215.76 a year.
5 Comments
How nice for you that you could GET Grand Central. You don’t mention that you currently need an invite to get it, or that it is currently still in Beta following acquisition by Google.
We were lucky enough to sign up before invites were required. I do have some invitations left, if you would like one leave a comment on my “GrandCentral Invites Available” post.
Make sure that 911 will work with this before you switch. Also if you live in an area with frequent power outage land line phone will still work while cells won’t because the towers go out without power.
km,
Thanks for the comment. We are using our cell phones for outgoing calls and 911 works fine on them (I had to use it once). The cell phone towers around here must have battery backup because our phones continue to work.
Granted the towers might stop working after the batteries are drained, but it isn’t a big concern of ours.
Cell towers have generator back-ups. They ’should’ continue to work as long as the generator lasts (i.e. enough fuel, etc). These are serviced regularly, so they should work. Don’t think the cell companies would want to loose the business during a power outage.
One Trackback/Pingback
Sunday Review #33!…
…
Post a Comment