My mom recently passed away, and I am living in the house until we get it ready to sell it and move out. As a result, I not only am responsible for upkeep, but paying bills (or sending them out to the executor of the estate) as well. Also as a result, I have been doing a lot of cost cutting, and one place that could use a LOT of that is the phone bill. Currently I have to pay about $100 a month for phone and DSL, and only $30 of that is for my Pro DSL service. I use my cell phone for 95% of my communications, but I don't want to just cancel the house # since that is the only point of contact to the house, and also want to keep it open for any communications from companies/people about my mother.
At first I was looking at Vonage and that looked very appealing, and then I saw some people here had "CallVantage" by AT&T and seemed to enjoy that, although
I just read a story that said that CallVantage will be phased out very soon in favor of another offering by AT&T. I looked around at a few other services that have been mentioned on this site, and it seems like all of them are "award-winning" in some way (according to the respective websites.) ViaTalk and MagicJack looked very appealing, but the inability to transfer my existing number over rather defeats the purpose of this.
A few other comments/questions about my situation:
The Pro internet speed is about 280-300 kb/s down and about 40-60 kb/s up. I often download over Bit Torrent network, which usually sucks up my bandwidth. The speeds get down to old school ISDN speeds sometimes. Would that cause a problem with talking to people on the phone, and vice versa, would talking on the phone have a major impact on my download/upload speeds?
Is transferring your phone number over a pain in the a**? As I said, I have AT&T currently.
People have mentioned issues with Vonage where you can't make some 800-number calls, especially 866. Can anyone attest to this, such as is this a problem on their services? The range of VoIP services people use on this site seems to be rather extensive.
Any thoughts/experiences on this would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.