After a decade of abuse I’ve decided to ditch my Bell landline in favour of VOIP.
My last Bell bill was $60.26 for a basic phone with 2 features.
I did a lot of research into the various providers in Canada. My short list of potentials was
In the end I went for AcroVoice because they seem to have the best mix of service, simplicity and professionalism. Their basic service is only $10.95/month and they provide pre-configured hardware at a reasonable cost.
I’m a little nervous about the switch process because I’ll be porting my old number. I don’t want any downtime on the line, and I don’t want my DSL service to get disconnected when Bell disconnects my landline. I’ll report back in a week or so.
Update 7 March 2011
My DSL internet service is provided by Sentex. When I
called them to notify them of the DRY loop change (DSL, no phone line) they
informed me that they would charge me $65.99 in fees, not the $15.99
advertised on their website, plus an extra $9.50/month. I’m feeling a little
bit screwed right now but it’s too late to back out.
Update 15 March 2011
The cutover went fine and the new phone line is working well.
However, I neglected to consider that our remotely monitored alarm system also
uses the phone line and this is now not functioning. My alarm
company is offering a cellular-based solution for
an extra $10/mth plus $299 for the connector but it isn’t very appealing given
the higher DSL costs I’m already shouldering. There might be a way that I can
jerry-rig the VOIP line to work with the alarm system, but I might be better
off just buying out the monitoring contract and switching to an alarm company
that supports VOIP.