Cheap long distance from home phone???

[busy mom]

If you don't have a cell phone, what do you do for LD on your home phones? Any low rates out there?

 

[Madison'smommy]

We have Vonage with unlimited LD.. we pay a little under $30 a month, I think. We have had it for nearly 7 years with no problems. There may be cheaper alternatives, but this works for us.

 

[pampam]

We buy a prepaid LD card from Presidents choice. It's $.04 a minute any where in Canada or USA. The card lasts for 6 months. We buy them in $10.00 -$20.00 increments, but very often they have a deal pay $20.00 and get $25.00 worth of LD.

http://www.pctelecom.ca/LCLOnline/pcTelecom_long_distance_cards.jsp

 

[indimom]

We have cell phones now, but we used AT&T prepaid calling cards for years. Got them at Sam's Club or similar. I think they were $30 or $40 for 1200 minutes. They would last a year or more for us since we don't make a lot of long distance calls. You had to punch in a few more numbers, but it was much more cost effective than paying for long distance service on our home phone.

 

[rock_doctor]

Do you have a descent internet connection? If you have 1.5 mb or better i would get yourself an OOMA unit. It is voice over ip like vonage but you buy the hardware up front ($250 +/-) and don't pay them anything more except for government taxes each month which are usually less then $4 per month. Free local and long distance calling to the US. Canada costs a couple cents more and the rest of the world a little more then that... We have one and a FIOS connection and love it. The quality is super clear (enough we can use a fax machine on the line). They move your phone number over to their system and you are done. You may consider getting yourself an ooma and let ooma give you a phone number and then port (move) your home number to google voice. Then have google voice forward the calls to your ooma number. This way when you are out of town have google voice take the messages as they will email a text copy of your voice mails as well as email you a link to the sound file. In addition, google will also forward these calls to your cell phone or what ever number you want. Ooma can also take your voice mail and then you can get it from your phone or ooma unit or off the web though the my ooma website. If you pay for the premier service then you can block calls and forward calls and so on. We don't have the premier service as we want as cheap as possible phone service. We have been very satisfied, they have worked very well but we also have rock solid internet access. So that is also super important. http://www.ooma.com/ Shop around for the ooma unit. Just about everybody sells it so you can price shop around for it. No matter what you pay for the unit the service is the same. The funny part...i found out about it from here, when somebody asked the same question as you did...

 

[CT_Bev&Jeff]

If you have an internet connection, then think about MagicJack.

You no longer have to keep your computer on, you set it up connected to the computer, then remove it and connect it to a wall electrical socket with its adapter and you have local and long distance almost free. Cost of new style magicjack is $70 and the yearly fee is $20.

Check them out and look at the telephone prefix's that are available for your area.

We love it. YMMV! I am not associated with magicjack in anyway other than consumer.

CT_Jeff

 

[StephMK]

We have cell phones now, but we used AT&T prepaid calling cards for years. Got them at Sam's Club or similar. I think they were $30 or $40 for 1200 minutes. They would last a year or more for us since we don't make a lot of long distance calls. You had to punch in a few more numbers, but it was much more cost effective than paying for long distance service on our home phone.

We do the AT&T card for now but may switch to cell only when DD goes to college next year. Right now we just have pay as you go cells but may move to a family plan. The card is really easy to re-load & not hard to use. Most of the time, my parents or ILs will just call us back as they both have unlimited LD and we don't call LD to many other people.