Alternative Phone Service Through the Internet - Fast, Cheap, and Sometimes Free

This article will tell you a little bit about internet telecom services, briefly contrast them, and give you some additional links to information at the end about which services will give you the most features for your money, and what the trade-offs are of each one.

Although this info is current at the time of this writing, please be aware that it may change after 2010. So please google those companies or visit their websites after this year to stay abreast of any price and/or feature changes that may come.

We've come a long way since the days of using a regular handset as our telephone. We've come a long way from things like not being quite sure who is on the other end of the line when s phone rings, or having a way to call them back if they hang up. Since the early 1990's, Caller-ID has been available for nearly every household in the US and Canada, along with other services such as 3-way-calling, automatic call-back features, and call forwarding. Back then, it was usually available for an additional price. The phone companies would add surcharges and taxes to nearly every thing that you added to your basic phone during the 90's and would charge you just about every time you used it (unless of course, you paid a lot more for a bulk-rate plan that many seldom used to its capacity).

That was then. This is now.

Today, those phone companies wouldn't be able to compete with any of the features they used to give even if they put them all together and cut the price in half. Even if they gave you half of the services for free, it still wouldn't compare to most of the newer plans out, or any of the mobile phone services you get today for between $50 to $100 a month.

You can thank the Internet for that.

Telephone companies had already been streaming data over digital networks for years. They saw early-on that they needed to cater to the growing demands of customers and add services that would keep moving ahead and as fast as the demand might carry them. What many of those companies never expected though, was that someday soon...all those services and features they were working on would be in the palm of your hands without any of them as the middle-men to profit from it. At least, not the landline providers. Those who make money today are the ones who capitalized upon the SIP phone techonology, internet communications, and cellular communications (cell phone technology).

Voice over IP is what the majority of cell phones, landlines, and digital networks use today. Commonly called VOIP, Voice over IP replaces the old analog style of communications with purely digital information that can travel unrestricted over the internet and through multiple channels. What this means is that for the price of your internet connection that you already pay for, you can use your existing internet connection to place calls all over the United States, Canada, and in most cases throughout different parts of the world.

At present, it is common for most calls on internet phones to be free to anywhere throughout the United States and Canada. To other places, most of the Voice over IP carriers charge a very small fee of a few cents per minute to connect to other countries. In most cases, you will be given a telephone number...or will be able to select the number you want from your carrier service.

Some services allow you to port your old telephone number over from a landline phone or cell phone/mobile, and others don't. Each service is a little different that way, but most often they have a means for you to select which area code you want even if you don't always get to select the phone number itself that you might want to have from a list.

Calling people from your internet-based phone can be done several ways. On desktops, laptops, and netbooks, you can place your calls with a microphone and headphones/speakers through a wireless or wired connection to the internet using a free service such as Media Ring Talk http://www.mediaringtalk.com or Internet Calls http://www.internetcalls.com

Most of the free services will not give you an incoming number where people can call you unless you opt to use their paid service. You will be able to call out unlimited times to your destinations, but people won't know who is calling them until they pick up the phone (or you decide to buy their featured service which gives you a mapped telephone number that will ring-in on your computer).

Some people don't like to have to use a microphone and speakers, or are more comfortable with a tranditional phone that resembles their old landline. With devices such as MagicJack http://www.magicjack.com you get to use a regular handset and plug it into the end of a device that connects to any available usb port on your computer.

MagicJack does not let you place free calls until you pay for at least a year's worth of service. You do have to obtain their device to use their service, but you can get a year or two worth of phone service with free long distance, caller id, voice mail, and unlimited calling for as little as $40 a year.

The only drawback to something like MagicJack is that your computer has to be on and working, and connected to the internet for you to be able to place and receive phone calls. If your computer is off, or your internet connection is out for a moment, you'll miss a call and they'll be sent to your voicemail where you can pick up the message and call people back later. Also, if you run a lot of programs at once on slower computers or any program that uses a significant amount of bandwidth on your net connection (games, torrents, chat sites, etc)...then your phone conversation will at times be choppy or sound strange.

If you plan to use magicjack or anything like it which uses your computer and your internet connection, try to be sure that your net connection is being used as little as possible or not at all when you place calls to ensure clearer calls. Try to make sure that your computer isn't running a whole bunch of applications that may take away from the computer's ability to service the device and keep up the quality of a call.

Sometimes it's a hassle to have to have your computer on, and always connected to the internet just to use your home phone. So, why not try an alternative? There is the extremely well-known Vonage solution that is gradually climbing in price and has become (to me) fairly expensive. Their popularity may have a lot to do with that, and the fact that they were one of the first providers to make an easy-to-use voice-over-ip phone appliance for people to make phone calls over their broadband internet connection without needing to be connected to a computer (and without having to own one). Still, their ever-increasing price is somewhat of a turn-off for me. So, in all honesty, I would recommend Lingo http://www.lingo.com as an alternative to Vonage. For $15 to $20 a month for the exact same (if not better) service than Vonage, you can't beat it.

Or can you?

I found something else on my quest for a better internet phone service. My friend Timo Voigt brought to my attention a very cool little device and service from a new company called NetTalk. The device is the TK6000, which is small enough to fit in your shirt pocket like a magicjack, but it permits you to use any internet connection and any phone like a magicjack...only you can use it internationally without having a computer at all, and can use it from any broadband connection without re-registering anything!

Right now they are charging $100 for the unit, and for a limited time, offering free lifetime service to the first few hundred thousand to sign up (surely to try and get them away from vonage, lingo, magicjack, and the rest). Like Magicjack/Ymax, NetTalk is soon to be doing deals with Verizon, so you can expect to hear more about this product and service very soon. For now, if you'd like to know more about it or order one for yourself, you can do so by visiting http://www.nettalk.com

There are a few other services too that are computer-based primarily, but I didn't feel they were worth mentioning...either because people already know about them...or there isn't anything special about them that would warrant their mention in contrast to what's being presented here. Internet-to-phone services through Yahoo Messenger, Skype, and MSN are just all too common, and I don't see why you'd want to use those when you could use one of the other computer-based services for free to call out with. Those same services are generally cheaper than Skype and Yahoo to have inbound phone calls with, too.

For a detailed list of Internet Phone Service providers, please visit http://www.bestwebbuys.com/VOIP_plan_comparison.html

May the best quality service for your money win. :-)