in Asterisk

Our outrageous phone bill

We just got our phone bill today – and boy, was it outrageous. It isn’t outrageously expensive, though: its outrageously cheap!

We’ve been charged $20 for our phone service. That’s right: twenty bucks … since May 15th! That’s $20 for ten weeks of service! And its all because we switched our phone service from AT&T to the Voice over IP (VoIP) provider Vitelity. We get two phone numbers, CallerID, and the ability for more than one simultaneous call.

Our base Bellsouth/AT&T bill used to be around $47.00/month. Long distance calling would tack on an extra $20 to that. Thus, our phone bill was often above $60/month.

Put another way, what we used to pay $60 per month for we now get for a jaw-dropping $8 per month! And through the magic that VoIP brings, we’re getting more features now for far, far less!

Voice over IP phone service isn’t rock solid, and it doesn’t always have the highest call quality. To save an extra 52 bucks each month, though, we can live with it!

  1. How much do you use your landline phone? We’ve been really happy with the lowest level of service with Vonage (500 minutes/month) for several years now, but our bill is still with taxes around just under $20/month.

  2. I’m not sure just how much we use our “landline,” though I can say we haven’t really changed our telephone use much at all. The only exception is that I am no longer working from home and thus not on long distance conference calls like I used to be. The vast majority of those were going over Vitelity, anyway, so they weren’t a factor in our $60+ phone bills.

    With Vitelity we pay $1.50/month for each DID and a per-minute charge of around $0.014, if I recall correctly. Thus if we make no calls at all we owe all of $3 for the month. And there aren’t any convoluted fees tacked on to this.

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