How to disconnect your land-line while keeping your phone number and still using your house phones. If you're like me you pay about $40/month for a home phone line you rarely use other than to receive calls from bill collectors and charities. Here's how you can save that $40/month, keep your same home phone number and only pay $19.95/yr for the service. As a plus you'll have free voicemail via email, speech to text of voicemails, free caller ID, and free long distance!You'll need a broadband Internet connection (DSL, Cable, etc) more about this later.
BUY A MAGIC JACK ( http://www.magicjack.com ) or you can pick them up Best Buy, etc. for $39.99 The MagicJack plugs into a PC and provides a phone jack to drive regular phones. With the MagicJack you'll get your phone service over the internet.
SETUP A PC that's always on and running. Anything that runs at least Windows XP and was built in the last 5 years should work.
INSTALL THE MAGIC JACK ON THE PC: Go ahead and pick a phone number and make sure everything works. At the time of this writing MagicJack doesn't support porting landline phone numbers. They've been testing it for 6 months now, but we've got a way around that.
ORDER A GO PHONE: If you've got an AT&T land line call AT&T ( 1-888-333-6651 ) and order a GO PHONE. Make sure you tell them NO CONTRACT. The cheapest GO PHONE will be about $15 and you'll need to buy some minutes to activate it. The cheapest minutes I could buy was $25 worth so the whole order cost me $40. Be sure to tell them you want to "port your home phone number" to the GO PHONE. You'll need to provide your home phone account number from your phone bill. Note that you can't do this in the AT&T store or online. You have to place the order over the phone.
VERY IMPORTANT: When you receive the GO PHONE don't activate it until you are ready for your land line to be disconnected as it happens instantly.
VERY VERY IMPORTANT: If you have DSL Internet then your DSL is probably on the same account as your home phone and will be disconnected when you disconnect/port the home phone number. If this is the case then call your DSL provider and explain your are going to port the home phone and tell them you want to arrange for new DSL service. Make sure you find out when the technician is going to come out (they have to change the DSL to a new port) and don't activate GO PHONE until the day the technician switches your DSL.
You can also take this opportunity to switch from DSL to a faster Fiber or Cable service or like me you can get your first year of your new DSL at the same speed for only $19.95/month because it is considered a new account/new service.
ACTIVATE THE GO PHONE: You may have to call AT&T to activate the GO PHONE. I couldn't get through the phone menus to activate it myself since it didn't recognize the landline number. The GO PHONE customer service people activated it in about 15 minutes. Congratulations your home phone service account is now cancelled.
GET GOOGLE VOICE: Google Voice ( http://Google.com/voice ) is FREE service from Google that provides number forwarding and voicemail. We're going to port your GO PHONE/LANDLINE number to Google Voice and then use it to forward to your MagicJack.
PORT THE GO PHONE NUMBER TO GOOGLE VOICE: Click Here for the Google Voice help page that explains number porting. Porting is a one-time $20 charge and takes about 24hours. The GO PHONE account will be closed automatically as soon as this takes effect.
ADD THE MAGIC JACK PHONE NUMBER TO GOOGLE VOICE: Add the Magic Jack number as one of your Google Voice phone numbers and you'll end up with your home phone number forwarded to your Magic Jack.My total outlay of $100 paid for itself after the second month. Thereafter I saved about $60/month for the first year. In the second year forward I'll still be saving about $40/month.
"Cutting the umbilical."
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