Its time to fire your mother.
Well, not your real mother, but that other mother whos ruled
you with a copper fist for most of your life: Ma Bell.
Dont get me wrong; you can appreciate everything the Bell
phone companies have done for you over the years. Life
would be bleak and you wouldnt 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 youre 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 doesnt have to be a sudden
breakup with Ma Bell. You can keep her on for while if youre
afraid to cut the fiber optic umbilical cord and unconditionally
accept this new broadband telephone technology until you
know how it works.
Thats what I did. For a while I had two telephones on my
desk: the Bell phone for incoming calls and my VoIP phone
for outgoing calls especially for long distance, since it now
costs nothing.
Once you have Voice over IP you wont 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 youll pay if you stay with that company for the
length of the contract. Subtract the cost of the buy-out and
thats how much money youll 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 youll get
unlimited local and long distance with VoIP for a flat, low
monthly rate.
You may worry that when theres a power or cable outage,
your phone wont work. True, but youll have a control panel
that you programmed to tell your VoIP server to
automatically forward your calls to your cell phone when the
VoIP connection is out.
So, maybe its time for you to join 17-million other VoIP user
and say, Sorry, Ma, weve grown up and were moving on.
Copyright 2006. Annette Estes. All rights reserved.
Permission to reprint granted as long as entire article and
tag line are included.
Author: Annette Estes
Article Source: EzineArticles.com
Provided by: Programmable pressure cooker
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