We used Bellsouth years ago, and frankly, Ma Bell sucks. They’re pretty much incompetent, couldn’t get a damn thing right, and got abusive with us about it. Long story nobody wants to hear, I’m sure, so suffice to say we dropped Bellsouth like a bad habit. It’ll be a cold day in hell when they get another dime from me.

We picked up cellular phones then and used them as our primary telephones. Worked pretty well for a couple years, but then we moved to our current home. It sits down in the bottom of a bit of a bowl, so the cell reception here isn’t too good unless you want to make calls from the attic.

Enter Vonage. Now I’ve got reliable telephone service at the house, it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than what Time Warner Cable offers the same service for, and it’s not Bellsouth.

I’ve been very impressed with Vonage so far. They got slapped with some small regulatory fee a while back that the government required them to charge us. Got a letter from them stating that since they had no choice in the matter, they would be lowering their price by the same amount, so that my bill would be the same it had always been. Nice.

They do some pretty cool extra stuff, too. Around Christmas, they added a special number you could call so your kid could leave Santa a voicemail. That’s not anything hard to do, but none of my previous phone companies has ever done it. Kidzookie got a big kick out of it. Why haven’t I ever had that before?

They’ve got some pretty cool inventive features, too, that I tend to get a little excited about. Thank God for wifezilla, who is rather unimpressed by this stuff… her cooler head generally prevails. For a couple extra bucks a month, they’ll let you have another phone number in any area code they have service. Neat. My wife and her dad talk on the phone a lot, and it doesn’t really cost us anything beyond the flat rate now, but it eats up his long distance calling cards. Let’s get a Seneca number so he can call us free.

WIFEZILLA: Or… he could just call us and tell us to call him back.

Oh yeah.

One thing I didn’t like off the bat was jacking my phone into my router. I can only have one phone? Screw that. Plus, my router’s on the third floor… I don’t want to go all the way up there to get the damn phone or put it back. And if someone calls me, I’ll never know.

Turns out that’s totally unnecessary. The phone lines in your home or apartment are really just a big parallel circuit. If you plug the router into the phone jack in the wall instead of a phone, then you can plug phones into the other jacks around your place just as you normally would, and they’ll just work.

PLEASE NOTE if you try this that you *must* remove your home from the phone company’s network first. They occasionally run voltage through the lines to test them, and if you’re still connected to their network when they do, it can fry your router & such. Disconnecting is pretty easy. There’s a box on the side of your house that’s the line of demarcation between what you own and what Ma Bell does. Open it up, and there’s a bunch of RJ11 jacks. Unplug, and voila. Cake.

Vonage has more technical documents (also more informative and probably a little more helpful and accurate) on how to do this on their website. You just have to dig a little.

More recently, I’ve started getting a lot of phone calls from Vonage offering me extra little services. This is a very recent development, but a rather odious one. One of the things I’d always bragged on them for is that they did not harass me with upselling the way they traditional phone companies always had. Worse, their recordkeeping seems to be rather poor. They called me last week to offer me a second line for free for two months, and I declined. They called me again last night with the same offer. Grr.

Overall though, I’m thrilled with them and can’t recommend them enough.

At present we are still needing to maintain a mobile phone as well (again, Pay-As-You-Go) for emergency calls and calls while we are, uh, mobile.