New phone service

Good evening all. In the never ending quest to both save money and my ass after last weeks issues with the Angry Webmaster, I started looking into replacing his current home phone service with something cheaper. His current monthly bill was approaching $50/mo for essentially local calling with no extras.

Needless to say, Mrs. Webmaster was rather annoyed when she found out about it. Between them, they use Skype-Out for Mrs. Webmaster’s calls to China, two cell phones, (Mrs. Webmaster prefers Straight Talk and I got His Nibs an account on Ting.) All those bills barely equal the one they get each month from Fairpoint Communications. (Or as I call them, Fairly Pointless) I started doing my research and as you might expect, I hit Vonage first. They were running around $30/mo with international calling, but I thought I could do better. I did.

I saw one of the ads for BasicTalk and took a look at them. They are a VOIP service similar to Skype and Vonage. They also run about $10/mo excluding taxes. This was for calling throughout the United States with unlimited time. They also threw in the phone router. This looked like a decent deal so I spoke with the brains in that family, (Mrs. Webmaster), and she said to try it. I signed them up with BasicTalk, installed the router and reconnected their phones and let them try it for a few days. Mrs. Webmaster was satisfied so I started the process to switch their landline number over to BasicTalk.

Now, when I did this, something went screwy with their BasicTalk connection. You could call in but not out. BasicTalk uses a chat system for support. I logged into their account and worked with their tech for a while. He was running me through all the things they do when dealing with customers who aren’t technically astute. I had figured out within the first couple of minutes that it was an account issue, but I let the guy go through his routine. I dropped a few subtle hints and he decided it was time to check the account and that was the issue. He had to reset it. Total time, about 15 minutes.

Once the happy couple’s landline number switched, I asked Mrs. Webmaster if she wanted the old answering machine or the one provided by BasicTalk. (Basically an online system not unlike Google Voice) I wasn’t able to get it enabled so back to chat with BasicTalk support. This time the resolution was about 5 minutes and everything is working just fine now.

The expensive old crappy phone service is now disconnected and Mrs. Webmaster is now able to call her sister in Alabama and all her friends outside of the old ~~Fairly Useless~~ Fairpoint calling circle. In my testing, I’ve found the sound quality to be excellent and I know that the ~~Clown Prince of Stupidity~~ Angry Webmaster has been using it for business calls in his Real World Job. One other nice thing about this is that the Happy Couple can unplug the router and take it with them to any location with high speed internet access. The one downside is that now the ~~Blithering Incompetent idiot~~ Angry Webmaster will have to use the internet web site for DirecTV if he wants to order Pay Per View or porn. He generally doesn’t waste money on it since it runs a good $5 per movie, and the porn he can get for free over the internet.

From our admittedly limited experience, I would say if you want to save money, ditch your landline and go with BasicTalk. It isn’t perfect, but with cell phones available, there is no reason to stick with a standard POTS line. Besides, ~~FairlyPointless~~ FairPoint has pretty much ended any plans to run their equivalent of FIOS any further then they already have, essentially giving up to Comcrap. Maybe Google will light up some Dark Fiber in our area.

One can only hope.

Thank you

~The Angry Systems Administrator~