Last fall our office switched all of our phone lines from traditional wired service to VOIP (Voice Over IP). For a recap of our switchover, read Upgrade Your Phone Service and Save Money With RingCentral. Another seven months have passed since that was written and we are still happy with our choice and the money we’ve saved.
Today I’m going to tell you about several other VOIP services geared towards home service. They cost much less than RingCentral, but they also don’t offer many services that are important to businesses. So even if you have a home-based office, it is likely worth getting all the integrated services RingCentral offers rather than the very inexpensive phone calls offered by the alternatives listed here. I love that RingCentral allows me to permanently block calls from “Sharon From Google.”
One of the benefits of VOIP services is the low cost. For me, the ability to take my home phone number anywhere in the world is equally important. I simply have a “little black box” that accepts an Ethernet cable and a phone cable. Plug it into a router and a regular old phone and my phone number can ring anywhere in the world! If you need some good old cordless phones to plug-in to your VOIP box, I love the Panasonic KT-TG6513B Cordless System.
Below are some of the more popular home VOIP providers. I do not have any personal experience with them so you’ll have to research if one of them will work for you. Typically you can get unlimited calls to the US and Canada for $10 or less a month.
I would love to cancel my land line as I already subscribe to a VOIP service, however, some features are not available, at least in Canada … i.e., 911 plus other three-digit features (non life-threatening). Are these coming to a VOIP service near me.
The RingCentral service we have in our office does work with 911, though the address listed on the account would always be shown even if the VOIP service was being used elsewhere. Beyond that, I don’t know about how other VOIP services handle 911 and know nothing about how phone systems of any kind work in Canada.
magicJack is my VOIP provider. Service in Canada appears to be diff than the US, at least in part. I wasn’t able to port my land no, had to choose a different area code and had to pay extra for choosing a Canadian area code. I can’t speak after why this is so and I’m not entirely convinced it’s the fault of the provider. Consider also, that it’s extra to have a .ca domain, vs .com (or was).