Living with VoIP

I have been POTS (plain old telephone service) free for a year, and life has been good.

For my landline, I use VoIP provider VoicePulse, which, for $15/mo, gives me a a 212 number in Brooklyn (or whereever I plug my SIP box into a broadband connection), voicemail which can be forwarded to e-mail, call forwarding, a web interface, unlimited local (new york area), and 200min national long distance. Verizon charges at least double (but of course doesn't require a broadband connection, which costs money).

I do use Verizon for my wireless service, and pay about $50/mo. It's nice they throw in a "free" dialup connection to the internet (my Kyocera phone has a Palm+Modem). It's slow, but useful in an emergency.

However, I'm really a big fan of Skype, and use it all the time. The main advantages are (1) I can call other skype users for free, and some of my friends who I talk to a lot are far-away skype users, (2) I happen to have a hands-free mic+headset that allows me to talk and type at the same time.

But Skype has some problems; the P2P setup is sometimes unreliable, I get disconnected more often than I'd like (though less than on my mobile phone), I have to pay one Euro per hour for calls to regular telephones (which is cheap at $0.022/min), but the Euro charges are no longer free of currency conversion fees), and the whole underlying system is based on a proprietary architecture.

But wait, enter Gizmo. It has the same download, ease of use of Skype, but it is based on the standard SIP architecture, and they chare for phone company access in dollars (cheaper than Skype for US calls, more expensive for Europe calls). They will give you a regular phone line dial tone for incoming calls for $5/mo plus usage charges, plus free voice mail (which you can use without a computer, just with a SIP box, as I do with VoicePulse).

So, roughly speaking, for 200 LD minutes, VoicePulse is half the cost of Verizon, and Gizmo is half the cost of VoicePulse, and Skype is slightly less than that.

I sense a trend.