Our new phone setup!

Our phones have changed, you all probably know by now but if you don't, surprise! If you do, this post is simply an explanation of how they work now. We're using three services, Google Voice, Skype, and Page Plus Cellular to get two phone lines for about $20 a month. So first, I'll explain what these three services do.

Google Voice is a call forwarding service that Google offers for free. You set up a number with it (by either getting a new one or porting your existing number to it) then you tell it what numbers to call when somebody calls the first number. It also has a handful of fancy features that we haven't tested yet. Things like letting you listen in to the voicemail when you answer instead of connecting the call so you can decide if you want to answer or not. You can also send the call between the lines you use Google Voice with. If you answer on your cell but want to send the call to your home phone so your spouse can get it, you just press a few keys and it is done!

Skype is something that has been around a while. It was a instant messenger (IM) program that let people send messages to each other but they've added some really great voice and video features. With Skype you can make voice and video calls for free between Skype users anywhere in the world (as long as you both have internet). You can also use Skype as a phone. You can get your own phone number and receive calls for about $5 a month and you can pay about $0.10 a minute to call phones through Skype.

Page Plus Cellular is a pretty standard pay as you go cell phone service. They use Verizon's network and phones and depending on how many minutes you buy it will cost $0.10 to $0.04 a minute. You could talk 1000 minutes on Page Plus, while on Verizon's monthly plan you only get 450 minutes. The down side of Page Plus is you have to buy minutes every 120 days or you loose them.

This is a fancy diagram I whipped up in Paint.NET to demonstrate how these services work together:

From 2011

(please note, it's 2708 not 0708, I made a typo)

Basically the old cell phone number is now our home number, and will always stick with us no matter where we go because we'll just connect whatever new phone service we have in the future. We currently have Google Voice set to ring our Skype number and our pay as you go phone.

Google Voice has been a pretty good product for us so far. When you leave a voice-mail Google converts it to text and sends us an e-mail so we can check e-mail, texts, and voicemail from our Gmail account. We did have to pay $20 to port our Sprint phone number over to Google Voice but otherwise they currently aren't charging us anything for the service.

The only problem we've run into so far is that if we are not logged into Skype when you call us, Skype immediately sends it to it's voice-mail. It's a bug with Skype and it seems they don't intend to fix it. I heard it is because they don't want to spend money ringing an account for 30 seconds that isn't logged in. This means we hear about 5 seconds of ringing on our phones then Skype answers the call and we don't get a second chance. The only way around this is for us to leave Skype logged in when we're expecting calls or have you call our cell phone number directly when we're out and about and it's urgent.

It's taken a lot of time and research to get it set up but so far it's a far cheaper and almost as effective as just getting regular cell phones. You do have to deal with more issues but that's how it usually is when you choose the cheaper of two options.

Oh, and while I'm on the subject, I wanted to mention one other service, Republic Wireless. It's still being tested but it shows promise I think. Basically they are combining cell and wifi into one phone and claim they can provide unlimited voice, data, and texts for $20 a month, as long as you use wifi as much as you can.