TLDR: replace your landline with a one-time $50 purchase and $20 to Google.
10 or so years ago, we disconnected our landline. Our local company had been Pacific Northwest Bell, then Qwest, and finally CenturyLink. The service got worse - noise on the line, sometimes voices of other people, etc. - and it always got more expensive. Caller ID started at $5/month but it went up from there. We were paying about $30/month for relatively basic service when we stopped.
We replaced it with an Obihai VOIP adapter and service from Google Voice. Now, when we get reminder texts from dentists, doctors, and so on, they go to the house line. When we get calls from schools, the cordless phones in the house ring. If we miss the call, the call is transcribed by Google and sent via email.
- Decide the phone or phone system you’re going to use
If you’re still using a landline, you probably have cordless phones. If not, you might have cordless phones hidden away in storage. Or you might have given them away or sold them at a garage sale. If you need cordless phones, we bought something like this, only 15 or so years ago.
The sound quality is awesome. If I need to make a long call, I don’t use my cell. Instead, I use a cordless phone that is designed to let you hear and speak clearly, not for playing Angry Birds or Facebooking. It fits well between my shoulder and jaw, so I can use two hands. Or I can use the built-in speaker.
If you live in a small place, you might be able to get by with a corded phone. It’s not a bad idea to have a corded phone and a cordless one: you’ll always know where the corded phone is going to be. You use a small device called a phone splitter to plug into your VoIP adapter and then you have two jacks for phones.
- Decide what adapter you’re going to use.
We first used a Cisco PAP-2T adapter. While Cisco is/was the big name in routers and commercial VoIP systems, that adapter wasn’t very good. I see they still make residential VoIP adapters but I wouldn’t recommend them.
We replaced the Cisco adapter with an Obihai 200 VoIP Adapter. They for about $50 every day but if you look for them on sale you can find them cheaper. Should you buy a used one? Maybe. You can - and should - reset the adapter back to factory defaults. There’s a lot of “knobs” - codecs, tone profiles, ring profiles, etc. - that the previous owner might have adjusted. They might have worked perfectly for them or they might have screwed things up and that’s why they’re selling it.
- Decide what phone number you’re going to use.
My wife really liked our land line number, so she changed her number to that and we got a new number from Google for our area code. It helped that I had put the old number on every do-not-call list that I could find. We paid $20 to Google for the number to be “permanent” - that was a one-time charge. I’m sure at some point there will be charges but it’s not like a cell phone where you’re paying every month or a domain where you pay every year.
You can just use the Google Voice number for free but it gave me more confidence paying the fee and then putting it on school forms and luggage tags and other items I didn’t want to have to update.
- Downsides
Really, the only downside is that some banks are able to identify our number as a Google Voice number and refuse to send verification messages to it.
- Upsides
By logging into the Google Voice account, you’re able to block calls by number, forward the number to another number, set “do not disturb”, etc. The nice thing is that you’re able to do this via a web interface where it’s a lot more obvious what’s going on.