If you've been looking for a way to reduce your monthly phone bill
without sacrificing features on your phone service, you might want to
look into companies that offer phone service based on Voice over
Internet Protocol technology- or VoIP for short. Voice over Internet
Protocol technology is offered by several different companies including
Vonage, Lingo, and SunRocket. While they all have different service
plans, prices, and features; there are also a number of general
features that they have in common. For example, all of them offer lots
of extra features included in there service plans at no extra cost, and
those service plans are generally competitive in price with what you'd
pay for a normal land based phone line from a conventional phone
company.
VoIP technology, as implemented by these companies, includes as
standard features many of the things that you'd pay extra for in order
to get from a conventional phone company. Voice mail, caller ID with
name, last number dialed calling, call transfers, call forwarding, call
waiting, and a lot more are all included among these features. Not only
are all of these features included, but they're also made enormously
more flexible because their settings can be changed and used from
anywhere by accessing your account online. For example, you can use any
computer with an Internet connection to initiate call forwarding. This
is a great feature for situations where you need to have calls to your
home or office number forwarded to your mobile phone, but forgot to do
it before stepping out the door. You can also often do things like turn
off the ability to dial international calls or directory assistance
from your online account in order to save money. Some services also
allow you to access your voice mail through your online account or have
it forwarded to your email. When one service forwards voice mail to
your email account it does so with the actual voice mail message
attached as a WAV file so that you can listen to the message right
there on your computer. At least one service will let you block phone
calls from certain numbers and or calls from numbers that don't offer
any caller ID data. Either of those two features are great ways to fend
off telemarketers or admirers who are just too aggressive for your
comfort.
While all of these features are extremely valuable, one thing that all
VoIP services have in common, and the feature that was really the whole
point of them to begin with, is the ability to make long distance phone
calls without any long distance rates. This is possible because of the
"Internet" in Voice over Internet Protocol. Essentially, VoIP
technology streams phone conversations in both directions over the
Internet in real time. This means that those phone conversations are
treated just like any other media that's sent over the Internet. Just
like MP3's, digital photographs, emails, and other types of document
that inhabit the Internet, there aren't any long distance charges for
phone conversations using VoIP. Best of all, it's completely compatible
with the conventional telephone network so you can still talk to people
who don't use VoIP.
When it comes to saving money and providing the maximum number of extra
features, VoIP technology is definitely worth looking into.