Verizon home phone service is totally gouging us these days
I was completely blown away when I saw just how much our home landline was costing per month. It seems that their rates are steadily increasing and all their added fees were ridiculous! Our voice service showed at around 36 bucks but add in over 13 dollars in freakin fees and you’re looking at a bill close to $50 bucks!!! 
…and we don’t even use our home phone that much.
All of us in the house have cell phones but our landline…well, it’s really more about the phone number being an attachment. I don’t have any free lines on my family cellular plan to even port the home number to. But I don’t think I’d want a home line on a cell anyway, I mean, who’s going to be the one that handles those calls.
So in search for an alternative solution, I’ve considered many possible options such as bundling the phone service with my cable and internet. The problem lies in many areas with my situation, clearly, there wasn’t a solution that didn’t offer some kind of potential problem.
Up until just about 2 hours ago, I was considering a triple package with one of the cable companies. I’d been contemplating fios for some time but just couldn’t commit to it. The two cable companies in town are comcast and broadstripe which used to be called millenium digital media. I started off with comcast years ago when they offered me one terrific deal with their tv and internet bundle. Some insanely reasonable price of like $70 bucks for internet and a premium digital package, locked in for 18 months…and was only suppose to increase after that period to $89 dollars. But sadly, the good times did not continue to roll and eventually I was looking at increased every two months until it was creeping up to about $135ish a month.
That’s when I switched to a competitor who offered me the ridiculously low price of about $80ish which included a dvr…and that locked in for a year. Now that happy year has been long gone and I’ve been looking at about $135ish a month again…but atleast I have dvr which I seriously don’t think I can live without….and for some odd reason, showtime and hbo pipes in on the analog signal for free.
Both these companies have a bundle package for their triple options. To be honest, I had less internet and cable issues when I was with comcast. Broadstripe gives me grieve periodically on my internet or cable. It seems every time I call in to report problems with my service, I hear their automated message saying there’s outages in other areas too. Maybe if I was paying the discounted price, I wouldn’t complain too much but now I’m paying full price, I expect full priced service to work flawlessly!! Atleast where I don’t need to call in every month it seems for something to go wrong.
Comcast bundles cost more money but they offer more HD content for free it seems, well, I think it’s their HD bundles so maybe it’s included in the price. Since I’m already with Broadstripe, getting a bundle there would possibly be less hassle with disconnects and reactivation and waiting for the service guy to come out etc. But I don’t know if I want to be locked into a termed service just to get a better deal either.
The other real problem is that the landline number is not in my name and trying to port the number may require extra headaches. I don’t know how willing verizon is transferring ownership of landline numbers nor do I know how prompt they are to releasing numbers for porting. Everything I’ve read online about porting numbers say to not go through the carrier who current has the number but to do the porting with the service you plan on going with and let them handle the paperwork….so calling verizon to ask questions doesn’t seem like a good idea if you’re really not wanting to alert them…ugh!
So after a few hours of searching for other solutions, even one of those magicjack commercials came on the tv which I was considering too but they don’t port numbers yet. I don’t think I want a computer to be on all the time for that to work either. It seems the answers are flying at me tonight as I’m focused on finding a solution….then just like that, I decided to load my shopping cart at amazon.com as I always do daily to see what prices have changed in my cart.
In case you didn’t know that trick, you just place items you want to price watch into your shopping cart, then click “save for later”. Each day, several times a day actually if I’m online, I’ll just load up my cart to see price changes. Amazon will tell you the current price fluctuations from when you placed that item into your cart. It’s pretty cool…before when they still offered their post sale price match, I used to always load the items I bought into my cart to monitor the price change. I’ve gotten refunds on the difference several times. They don’t do the post sale price guarantee anymore, guess too many of us were taking advantage of it. 
Now I just put stuff in my cart to wait for the price to drop down a bit and snag it.
There was this revere tea pot that I was watching for a year….couldn’t buy it at their long held price of $29.95. Suddenly one night, I loaded the cart and couldn’t believe my eyes! The kettle had dropped from $29.95 to just over $13 bucks!! 
And they offered a 4 for 3 deal on it!! And I had a $25 gift certificate balance on my account anyway so I decided to snatch it up. I ended up buying 4 kettles for just under $15.00 total!!!! I couldn’t believe my luck. Since I’m a prime member, all 4 kettles arrived at my door step in 2 business days for free, love the prime shipping…I abuse the hell out of that too. Most of the time, amazon just ship single items out in different packages even if the order had multiple items, I think it’s because it goes out from different warehouses. Anyway, I still have 3 of the kettles here, maybe I’ll unload them on ebay but they are great kettles too! I may just keep them for gifts or whatever. Oh, the next day after placing the order in the wee hours of the night, I went to make sure I wasn’t dreaming that I got the kettles at such a steal and to my amazement, the tea kettles went back up to their original price again and haven’t dropped again. Crazy! Price watching at amazon is like a game, it’s addictive and fun! It feels great when you get a bargain!
So I went to load up my cart and right when I clicked my cart, I caught something on the main page of amazon that made me hit the back button quickly. What I saw could quite possibly be the answer to all my verizon home phone landline price issues…..
If you’re sick of paying for your landline too, you have GOT to check this out: Ooma Core VOIP Phone System. I don’t have any actual personal review on it yet but man, I saw it tonight and it seems to be the answer. For the cost of the device, in roughly 5-6 months, it would pay for itself verses what we’re paying now for verizon landline. Currently the price at amazon at the link I provided above is at $219.99 and they charge you $39.99 to port your number unless you take advantage of their premium service which I don’t see a need for our use but who knows, it’s like $99/yr and you get a second line along with other services and they waive the number porting. Technically, that’s just over $300 for the first year. At the verizon $50/mon, that’s 6 months to break even and then the rest as they say is gravy.
I had thought about other VOIP services like vonage but I remember my sister in law having that in their house and with 2 teenagers gaming over the internet, the phone calls were always really choppy. I really like the idea of paying for the device and not having to pay a monthly fee ever again. I had no idea something like that was available or even gave it a thought but I’m very glad that I saw this item on amazon….which makes me wonder if they are able to somehow track my web browsing activities to know exactly what to throw up in an effort to entice me to buy yet another thing from them.
Most of the reviews there and other places seem to be positive, I almost wish it was monday so I can place the order and get it in two days. Now I have to wait the weekend out but maybe that’s a good thing so I can do more research and see exactly how I can make this transition as seamless as possible. Hopefully I won’t have any issues porting the number since it doesn’t need to be tied to my cable account with a different name than the landline account.
I’m too excited to sleep! So far, this year is going pretty good. 
Since I didn’t post on New Year’s Day….. Happy New Year! 
