Fire The Phone Company And Save Money

This article looks at four free or cheap phone company alternatives including VoIP appliances such as YMax MagicJack, and Google's new Google Voice service.

"Though it is as much a fixture in American households as the television and the microwave oven, the home telephone has become superfluous. Blame (or thank) cell phones, which are now so widespread that an estimated 1 in 5 homeowners have abandoned their landlines in favor of them.

I'm not quite ready to do that. Cell phones make woefully inconvenient home phones because they're almost never at arm's length when a call comes in--and that's assuming you can hear them ring (or vibrate) when you're in another room. They tend to run out of juice at the worst possible time, and they're notorious for dropping calls in the homestead, where signal strength can be low at best."