| what to pick!! I am trying to cut down on costs & maybe a phone. My Comcast triple play (hm, cable, internet)is going away $120 (2 yr deal) I have verizon business phone in my home as well & 2 verizon cell phones & a fax number piggybacking on the verizon ofc #$55 month.
I need to keep the busn line as I get free phone book & online listings as I am a busn. If I change to callcentric or ooma or whomever will I still get the free listings as I am still under a busn name?? Should I just kill off the hm # & keep busn & fax but change to comcast. Should I get a pageplus prepay card for the cell #'s & lose that high monthly bill. I pay $120 for 2 #'s, 1400 minutes.
All together I pay about $295 month for 2 cells, 1 hm, 1 ofc, 1 fax, internet & about 80 cable channels. Help!! TOO MUCH!! |
| There's some info regarding listings in one of the VoIP forum threads:
»Caller ID etc.: voip.ms vs. CallCentric
Sounds like it's a crapshoot as to having a listing once you port your number.
On the cable front, we scaled down to limited-basic cable sometime last year. Would have dropped it altogether, but Comcast has this weird pricing structure where you actually pay less for limited-basic + HSI than you pay for HSI alone.
There wasn't much of a content difference as most of our regular shows were on OTA channels anyway. For us, losing the DVR was the big problem. If that's an issue for you as well, you should be able to go with an HD Tivo and tune the clear QAM.
We went the HTPC route and purchased a $200 Beyond TV/HDHomeRun/Firefly bundle back in 2008 (no longer an option, unfortunately). Put all that onto a $400 Dell Vostro 220 mini tower and that took care of the missing DVR part of the puzzle. Not the cheapest solution and can be a pain to get working smoothly, but it did allow us to drop around $65/month in cable without any addition monthly fees (I'm looking at you Tivo!), so it paid for itself in less than a year. An HTPC running Windows Home Premium's Windows 7 Media Center together with an HDHomeRun is probably a better HTPC option at this point, if you're inclined in that direction.
Switching our home phone to Callcentric dropped the landline cost to $10 or less per month. So our DIY triple play runs around $70/month after $750 ($600 HTPC, $50 cable modem, $50 ATA) in up-front costs and we've been pretty happy with the results. Beyond missing a few shows we can catch online anyway (Daily Show, Colbert, etc), it's been utterly painless. When things are slow on the TV front and we want something to watch, Netflix streaming fills the gap.
Haven't found any way to trim our wireless bill. With 2 iPhones, I'd love to hear options, but I fear there's not much hope while we're still under contract to AT&T. |
