On Fri, Apr 30, 2010 at 10:10 AM, AZ Pete <subs2@cactusfamily.com> wrote:

I have Cox for Internet, Phone and Cable.

Several months ago I was getting irritated with the high cost of the land line phone portion of my bill. What I did was to get a Google voice number, which provided me with free long distance and voice mail (as well a many other excellent features - all for free). I then dropped all the "bells & whistles" and long distance service from my land line and simply have a basic line w/Caller ID. The cost for this land line is $11.75 line fee + $5.95 for caller ID. The rest is various taxes. Total land line = $28 /month.

If someone calls my land line directly (instead of my Google #), I have an answering machine to handle that.
If you really want to get lean, drop your land line altogether and have your Google voice number simply route to your calls to your cell phone.

As far as fax service, there is absolutely no need to have a dedicated fax line and machine these days. There are so many online services available for so cheap that it doesn't pay to "host" it yourself. My brother receives hundreds of faxes each month and he pays $2-3 per month flat rate. To send a fax, he simply sends an email to the hosting service and they fax it appropriately (although the need for sending faxes is getting exceedingly rare).

Hope this helps.
Peter

joe@actionline.com wrote:

Are there any alternatives to Qwest for land-line telephone and DSL service?

Qwest has just raised their rates and I think some of the charges are
unreasonable, particularly for voice mail and the portion of the DSL
service that goes to M$ (which is the most irritating since I don't use M$
for anything).

For the land-line phone service, I pay $37.99/month which includes a
second land-line and voice-mail for one line. But then they charge $6.20
for each of the two lines for "Federal Access Charge" (probably can't do
anything about that). But for voice mail on the second line, they charge
an additional $7.95/month plus $3.95 for an extension mailbox. That part
seems excessive to me. Surely there must be some other good alternatives.

The broadband charges show as $38.00 for Qwest Connect Platinum
plus $16.99 for Qwest Connect PLTNM w MSFT, less "bundle savings"
of $5.00/month and a promotional discount of $15.00/month.
So $54.99 - $20.00 = $34.99/month.

Any suggestions?

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