Unless you have been living under a rock for the past several years, you should be considering VOIP services for your home phone. VOIP service is where you use your high-speed Internet connection to make and receive phone calls. Your local telephone company is not involved with your home phone at all anymore. The cost savings and benefits are huge, as discussed in this article.

The first thing you need is a reliable high-speed Internet connection. Dial-up will obviously not work, and a satellite connection will not work well either. If you have cable Internet or DSL Internet service at your home, and the connection is very reliable, then you should not have any problems with your VOIP service. Some people, especially in the DSL world, have high-speed Internet via DSL but their DSL service is very poor, and if that is the case, then you are not going to be happy with anybody's VOIP service either. In more than 96% of reported problems with VOIP service, the problem turned out not to be with the VOIP service, but the lousy high-speed Internet service at the customer's home.

One thing that confuses some people is that the high-speed Internet service is not included in the cost of the VOIP service. You purchase the VOIP service, and the VOIP provider assumes that you already have a reliable high-speed Internet connection, but the VOIP provider typically does not provide your high-speed connection, nor do they have any control over it, since it is normally provided by a different company.

Where should you buy your home VOIP service? First look at the large number of VOIP providers that you have to choose from. All of their offerings are pretty much the same, with only a few minor differences here and there. But do your homework, and check the VOIP provider's rating with Consumer Reports and online reviews. One place to NOT get your VOIP service is typically via your cable company. Yes, you will get your cable service and VOIP services billed on the same invoice every month, but you are going to be paying about twice as much as you should for the VOIP service, which is a very high price to pay for that convenience.

Let's look at the financial part of it and see how that falls out. With your traditional home phone line, you are probably paying at least $25 a month or more, and the only thing that gives you is dial tone. No long distance is included in that price. You might have a plan from the phone company that also provides unlimited long distance, but now you are paying about $50 a month.

Now compare that to the cost of home VOIP service. For about $25 a month (and some are much less than that), you get dial tone, you can make unlimited local calls, and you can make unlimited calls anywhere in the continental US. Some carriers expand your long distance to include Canada and Puerto Rico also. You also get voicemail, caller ID, and typically other features that your phone company would charge extra for, like call waiting and call blocking.

So even if you don't make a lot of long distance calls, you are still saving money for basic phone service. And if you do make long distance calls (or if you WOULD make long distance calls if they didn't cost you anything extra), you can save a ton of money.