Fire Your Phone Company: Get a Free Landline

In order to get our phone connected to the Internet we need to buy a device called an Analog Telephone Adapter (ATA) device. We go to Amazon and buy the device I use in this course.

Some 70's style phones use pulse dialing and not DTMF (touch tone). We can support that anyway with an older ATA device.

In this lecture we open a VOIP account. We use a service with a free option to provide our internet phone.

We set our Internet phone password.

While waiting for our hardware to arrive, we can still make a phone call. We will use our desktop computer as our phone.

Continuing with our theme, we demonstrate that we can use a free app on our iPhone to make VOIP calls.

We learn how to hook up our ATA device to power, the internet, and a phone. We then ask the ATA device for the IP address we can use to configure it from a browser.

We provide the username, password, and other needed info to the ATA device so that it works well with our VOIP provider.

We check the physical phone to see if it has dial tone. Then we test with a call.

We take advantage of an ongoing special that provides a free phone number and unlimited incoming calls. We choose our number and order the free plan.

I use my cell phone to dial our new number to see if our Internet phone will ring.

Free setup and free monthly gives us the freedom to be a bit fickle. We cancel our last number, and order a new and better number.

A demonstration of the replacement number working on the phone.

We currently have the internal VOIP number working, the canceled number will work until the end of the month, and we added a new New York number. That is three numbers all working at the same time. There is a lot of flexibility with the VOIP phone.

The purpose of our regular phone number is to receive calls for free from the regular phones on the Public Switched Telephone Network. If you are only getting calls from other VOIP callers, you don't need this feature. VOIP to VOIP calls are already free without a special number. These terms prevent hoarding or wasting the numbers by not using them.

There is a lot included for free. But as I stated at the start, outgoing calls are charged by the minute with the most basic of plans.

We add voicemail to our phone and create a custom greeting.

We can turn our incoming phone number into a fax machine just by making one selection. I show you how to do it, and demonstrate with a fax. So either get a second line and dedicate a line for faxes, or switch the fax service on and off as needed.

We add an extension and second phone. We test calling between the phones. Then we configure it so incoming calls ring both phones. We demonstrate conferencing between three phones. Note that the limit to conferencing is four phones.

We create a hotline with three digit calling between phones.

The phones are independent and can be connected anywhere in the world there is Internet. You could use this setup to have a free and unlimited calling between you and a child away at college.

Cheap phone service doesn't only help us, it helps the people that want to sell us something. The US Do Not Call List has not done the job. We still get robo calls.

But we can take matters into our own hands and block these annoying calls ourselves. In this lecture I show you how.

We have minimized our costs quite well. But if you use more than a hundred minutes dialing out, we might save money with some plans we look at.

We also look at getting phone numbers from international locations.

There are many companies that provide VOIP service. You don't have to go with my choice.