It’s time to fire your mother.
Well, not your real mother, but that other mother who’s ruled
you with a copper fist for most of your life: Ma Bell.
Don’t get me wrong; you can appreciate everything the Bell
phone companies have done for you over the years. Life
would be bleak and you wouldn’t be able to work or keep up
with family and friends without your telephone service.
Some of you may be old enough to remember rotary dial
phones and having to get an operator to make a long
distance call. Maybe you’re not old enough to have been on
a party line, but you may remember your parents or
grandparents talking about having to share a line with their
neighbors.
My, how times have changed. And now you can kick Ma out
of your home and office for good. Not to switch exclusively to
using a cell phone as many have (a new email is making
the rounds that tells of another scientific study showing
prolonged cell phone use can cause brain tumors), but
because you can have VoIP!
You may not be the kind of person who embraces a new
technology right away, so it doesn’t have to be a sudden
breakup with Ma Bell. You can keep her on for while if you’re
afraid to cut the fiber optic umbilical cord and unconditionally
accept this new broadband telephone technology until you
know how it works.
That’s what I did. For a while I had two telephones on my
desk: the Bell phone for incoming calls and my VoIP phone
for outgoing calls – especially for long distance, since it now
costs nothing.
Once you have Voice over IP you won’t be able to imagine
paying anything to make long distance calls in the U.S. and
Canada, or paying $80 or more a month to get a few
hundred minutes of long distance on a cell phone.
If you have a contract with a Bell company or reseller, you
may be hesitant to buy out the contract. But do the math.
Figure out how much it will cost you to buy out the contract
(mine charged $20 for each unused month). Then figure out
how much you’ll pay if you stay with that company for the
length of the contract. Subtract the cost of the buy-out and
that’s how much money you’ll save in the long run.
You can probably cut your phone bill in half and have a
clearer phone line. If you have a separate long distance
company, you can fire them immediately because you’ll get
unlimited local and long distance with VoIP for a flat, low
monthly rate.
You may worry that when there’s a power or cable outage,
your phone won’t work. True, but you’ll have a control panel
that you programmed to tell your VoIP server to
automatically forward your calls to your cell phone when the
VoIP connection is out.
So, maybe it’s time for you to join 17-million other VoIP user
and say, “Sorry, Ma, we’ve grown up and we’re moving on.”
© Copyright 2006. Annette Estes. All rights reserved.
Permission to reprint granted as long as entire article and
tag line are included.
Annette Estes is a Certified Professional Behavioral and
Values Analyst. She’s a life coach specializing in helping
people save money. She is an award-winning columnist
and author. Her book Why Can’t You See It My Way?
Resolving Values Conflicts at Work and Home is in its fourth
printing. Annette was a television news anchor for 15 years
at WYFF-TV and WSPA-TV. One of her missions is to help
others understand VoIP technology. You can subscribe to
her free newsletter at http://www.BestVoipTips.com.
