Verizon's coming over tomorrow to replace our DSL with FIOS, which is the final piece we need to replace our phone service with Vonage (as our DSL doesn't have good enough upload speed). Between DSL, business phone line, business fax line, and two cellphones, we're paying $260 a month for phone. Once FIOS and Vonage is done, we figure that'll drop our phone bill by close to $100. We might also downsize the cellphone plan and the phones, as I really don't use many minutes. We might go back to our old plan of getting Shelly a decent cellphone plan and getting myself one of those $25-a-month plans.
Biggest problem with Vonage is that it doesn't work through your existing phone jacks, so you've gotta figure out how to run your entire house on the single phone jack in the Vonage box. I replaced all our house phones last week with a nice Motorola 6-station phone, so hopefully switching over to Vonage will be as simple as moving the plug for the base-station to the Vonage box. All the new phones cost about $400, but that'll be offset by the monthly savings. We're still four weeks from having the phone number transferred, so that's a savings that's still a while away.
Thus far, we're not cramping our lifestyle significantly. The phone-thing, for example, won't be any different from our old phone setup when all is said and done. Except that we've now got cooler phones.
. . .ya know, it's a damn shame that I've got about 1500 square feet of flat steel roof that's soaking up 37 jillion ergs of energy every day, and then my heat pump has to suck energy off the grid to offset all those ergs. I need me some solar panels!
