A Quick and Easy Way to Ditch Your Landline

by Andrew Wiggin⁽¹³⁾
http://www.onsip.com

In this day and age, landlines are becoming increasingly archaic and meaningless. More and more people are giving it up to focus on mobile phones, which makes perfect sense. After all, why spend money on an extra device when everyone in the family likely has their own? But what if you want to get rid of your landline without buying a cell phone? Suppose you only need to use your landline infrequently and it doesn't make sense to pay a separate bill for a service you barely use? Turns out, there is a way to get rid of your landline using VoIP technologies to both send and receive calls - free! It requires you to change the way you're used to making and receiving calls, but it's a great solution for those who want to save a quick buck or just want to be cool.

The solution is to configure Google Voice correctly. You just need a reliable Internet connection, a computer with a microphone and speaker...and nothing else. No special software is needed since everything is web based. So you first sign up on Google Voice and get a phone number. The fact that you can choose which number you want is icing on the cake. Once you have that, log into your Google Voice settings and add "Gtalk" as a phone that you would like to use to send and receive calls. This means that whenever Gtalk is open and a person dials your GV number, a message will pop up with a ring tone asking you to respond. Just make sure your microphone is working, click "answer" and you're ready to go!

But "hold on" - you say! I promised there would be no software to install and here I am specifying that Gtalk needs to be running. Well, that's easily answered. Your Gmail application enables you to turn on Gtalk from the browser. So you're always online without anything running but a browser. This also gives you unmatched flexibility since you're not tied down to a particular phone. You can make and receive calls from any device from anywhere using the same number! That's a flexibility that your landline just can't match.

There are some further tweaks such as connecting a landline phone using an ATA to your router so that you can still receive calls on a device which looks like a phone for easy communication. But that's something we'll explore another time.

Andrew Wiggin is an expert consultant on getting started with hosted business VoIP. He also specializes in SIP provider solutions.

Article submitted Monday, October 10, 2011 & read 2 times.

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