Unwired

Or perhaps, if not exactly “Unwired”, then at the very least “UnPOTSed”.

The last few days, most of the odd moments I normally spend blithering my blather here have been spent on the phone with various telcos and related entities, rearranging the way they extract money from my wallet.

Vonage now offers 911 service.  This was pretty much the last straw I needed to finish getting wireline telcos out of my life—something I managed to do with cable TV providers 12 years ago, and have wanted to do with GTE and their successor Verizon, ever since…

For anyone unfamiliar with them, Vonage is a Voice Over IP (VOIP) provider. If you have a broadband internet connection, you can get a simple little box from them (a Cisco ATA186) that jacks into your router and provides a conventional phone jack on the other end.

Plug your phone into it, or plug it into your existing phone wiring (not while the telco is still attached, please), and you have a nice quality, feature-laden voice line with unlimited local and US/Canada long distance—for $35 — less than you’re probably paying for your existing phone line, even before you consider long distance.  They also sell it without unlimited long distance for $20.

Among the features is a “network availability” number, so calls can be automatically routed to another number (a cellphone, perhaps) should your ATA be unreachable (due to ISP problems or whatever).

I shot the first of three POTS (Plain Old Telephone System) lines in February in favor of a Vonage line, but I was reluctant to get rid of the others, simply because if a phone has dialtone, somebody sometime may try to dial 911 on it and expect it to work—Vonage at that time did not offer 911. 

The other factor was to make sure that everyone in the house (I have a 17 and a 20 year old) had the ability to dial emergency services even if there wasn’t dialtone.

Now that Vonage offers 911 service, I’m able to replace one other line with Vonage’s local service (to keep said offspring off my line), provide the youngest with a cellphone, terminate the final line, save a fair amount of money, and get Verizon out of my life.

Of course, like anything involving telcos or cellphone companies, expect to spend a lot of time on the phone.  Here are a few things I’ve learned over the past few days that might be of help to someone.

Cellphones and Family Plans—I’ve always wondered if you can still get a cellphone “deal” when adding a person to a family plan.  I’ve learned that, at least right now, in the case of AT&T Wireless and T-Mobile, the answer is “yes”.  In fact, you can go get a phone on any deal you find that requires activation, and activate it as a line on a family plan, at least for the first several phones.

AT&T basically charges $20 per month to add a second phone to an existing plan (it’s more complicated than that, but that’s about what it amounts to).  T-Mobile is a little more complicated, with a handful of dedicated family plans that basically contain a feature mix different than what I want.  Pricing is similar to AT&T.

GSM Phones and Travel – I’ve got to make a trip next month to a rural area. I was not terribly surprised to find that my technogeek AT&T phone wouldn’t have service there.  I was pleasantly surprised however to find that T-Mobile does—and also has pretty fair coverage out of major metro areas in general.

So, one kid gets my existing AT&T phone, the other gets another on AT&T’s family plan, and I get a new phone with T-Mobile—one of the few cellphone companies I haven’t ever tried.

Smartphones – This let me replace my T68i with a Nokia 3650.  I absolutely love this phone.  Running the Symbian OS and Java, and expandible to 128 meg of ram (via MMC), it’s about halfway between a nice GSM phone and a good PDA.  It syncs with my desktop via Bluetooth, and has a growing library of about 200 nice applications, including a ton of games, e-book readers, typical PDA style apps, and stuff that only makes sense on phones (such as smart call screening, etc.). 

It has a nice quality camera built-in, for a phonecam, and can even take short video clips with sound.  Reception and sound quality are excellent.  It’s slightly larger than most candy-bar phones (to accomodate a larger screen), but I’m very happy with it - by far the nicest cellphone I’ve ever owned.

T-Mobile and Data – Between the time I ordered the phone and the time it arrived, T-Mobile started offering unlimited internet access on any phone plan for an extra $20.  This means that I can use Bluetooth and my notebook or PDA to get internet access anywhere I can get T-Mobile service. 

This solves my problem of having to have a dialup ISP (with rural access numbers) for travel, plus my need to have a dialup ISP for broadband backup.  Nifty.  For icing on the cake, I can add unlimited use of T-Mobile hotspots (broadband wi-fi, mostly in airports and Starbucks) for another $20.  The only thing I’ve found so far that I don’t like about T-Mobile is that they don’t offer a loss or damage policy on their phones.

All in all, it’s been a good phone week…

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A few more notes on Vonage – Vonage provides dialtone and calling into the US from anywhere you can get broadband, although you do have to have a US billing address.  You can also add additional local numbers in any of their supported area codes for $4.95.  Yes, this does mean you can be in London or Tokyo and have unlimited calling in the US, plus a local number in NY and LA, if you’d like. 

The voice quality is easily as good as I got from POTS, and since February, many people have mentioned how good the call sounded—without knowing I was on a VOIP line.  Not to sound crass and commercial, but if you’d like to try it with a free month, e-mail me and I’ll send you an invite that gets you a free month and me one too.  Or e-mail anyone else you know with Vonage; they’ll probably be happy to do so too.  Service includes voicemail, caller ID, call waiting, call forwarding, call transfer, and all of the other crud that the telcos like to charge $3 a service for, all as part of the basic price. 

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