Residential Telephone Service Best Plan

[Guest Sundancefisher]

Hi all.

 

What is the best deal out there for residential phone service. Also please take into account anything that make it less convenient for payment, tracking etc.

 

Telus appears to be very expensive these days.

 

Thanks.

 

Sun

[birchy]

My wife and I are using Primus TalkBroadband Voice over IP. Basically takes advantage of your existing high speed internet connection..

 

So far we love it. Very cheap.. in the past we've had both Telus and Shaw cable telephone.

 

You can do some pretty funky stuff with it too with their online "portal".. basically a website you login to and administer your phone.

 

- You can see all incoming and outgoing calls, so if a telemarketer calls you can select their # and add a "call treatment" to block that number, so if they ever call back they get a recorded message "this person is not currently accepting phone calls".

 

- You can set it up so if a person has a private name/number, they'll get a message "this caller does not accept unidentified calls. Please press 1 now to record your name to identify yourself, or press 2 to enter an access code." If you have a close friend who calls you all the time but their number is blocked, you can give them this access code you set up and they can enter it to bypass this step. Once they identify themselves.. THEN your phone rings and it displays "privacy guard call".. when you answer it, it says "you have a privacy guard call from *insert recorded name here*, press 1 to speak to them, press 2 to announce yourself busy, and press 3 to put them through to voicemail. VERY COOL.

 

- You can also set up call forwarding online so it will automatically route incoming calls to your home # to a cell phone or other.

 

- You can add a "secondary #" for an extra $4 a month which gives you a different area code. So if you have family in Vancouver you can add a secondary # to your account with the 604 area code and your family from Vancouver calls you just as they would call a local #.

 

- There's also a "find me/follow me" feature that I haven't used yet. But basically you can take your VoIP box when you travel.. plug it in, and your phone acts just as if you were home. No long distance charges if people call you from home.

 

 

Those are just a few of the things you can do. So far I love it. Will never go back.

[Brownstone]

Agree, IP phone is the way to go, cheap, eliminates long distance..won't be long before Telus drops the land lines IMO..