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It's time to fire your
mother.
Well, not your real mother, but that other mother who's ruled you with a
copper fist for most of your life: Ma Bell.
Don't get me wrong; you can appreciate everything the Bell phone
companies have done for you over the years. Life would be bleak and you
wouldn't be able to work or keep up with family and friends without your
telephone service.
Some of you may be old enough to remember rotary dial phones and having
to get an operator to make a long distance call. Maybe you're not old
enough to have been on a party line, but you may remember your parents
or grandparents talking about having to share a line with their
neighbors.
My, how times have changed. And now you can kick Ma out of your home and
office for good. Not to switch exclusively to using a cell phone as many
have (a new email is making the rounds that tells of another scientific
study showing prolonged cell phone use can cause brain tumors), but
because you can have VoIP!
You may not be the kind of person who embraces a new technology right
away, so it doesn't have to be a sudden breakup with Ma Bell. You can
keep her on for while if you're afraid to cut the fiber optic umbilical
cord and unconditionally accept this new broadband telephone technology
until you know how it works.
That's what I did. For a while I had two telephones on my desk: the Bell
phone for incoming calls and my VoIP phone service
for outgoing calls - especially for long distance, since it now costs
nothing.
Once you have Voice over IP you won't be able to imagine paying anything
to make long distance calls in the U.S. and Canada, or paying $80 or
more a month to get a few hundred minutes of long distance on a cell
phone.
If you have a contract with a Bell company or reseller, you may be
hesitant to buy out the contract. But do the math. Figure out how much
it will cost you to buy out the contract (mine charged $20 for each
unused month). Then figure out how much you'll pay if you stay with that
company for the length of the contract. Subtract the cost of the buy-out
and that's how much money you'll save in the long run.
You can probably cut your phone bill in half and have a clearer phone
line. If you have a separate long distance company, you can fire them
immediately because you'll get unlimited local and long distance with
VoIP phone service for a flat, low monthly
rate.
You may worry that when there's a power or cable outage, your phone
won't work. True, but you'll have a control panel that you programmed to
tell your VoIP phone service server to
automatically forward your calls to your cell phone when the VoIP
connection is out.
So, maybe it's time for you to join 17-million other VoIP
phone service user and say, "Sorry, Ma, we've grown up and
we're moving on."
Article Information
Annette Estes is a
Certified Professional Behavioral and Values Analyst. She's a life coach
specializing in helping people save money. She is an award-winning
columnist and author. One of her missions is to help others understand
VoIP technology. You can subscribe to her free newsletter at http://www.BestVoipTips.com.
source: goarticles.com
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