A lot of us - 85% of US households - end up keeping a landline, at least for now, for reasons similar to those expressed by Dan York in Four reasons I am choosing NOT to cut the landline cord.

Once you’ve decided to keep landline service for whatever reason, the PhoneGnome box is a terrific way to make that old landline useful and keep the cost down.

1. Enjoy all those calling features without high telephone company costs - Get the absolute cheapest landline service, and still have Three-way Calling, Call Forwarding, Call Transfer, Speed Dial, Telemarketer Screen, Do Not Disturb, and more, free with no monthly fees.
2. VoIP for long-distance - Use VoIP for long-distance calls seamlessly and automatically. Lowest possible rates - as low as free for many calls. Nothing to learn. Save on all calls made in the household. No computer needed and no software to install. No special phone or training of the household required - they won’t even know it’s VoIP.
3. Internet features - Make your phone work with your email, web, etc. Free voicemail to email. Web phone book with click-to-dial. On-line call logs. Record phone calls to WAV files. Web APIs and widgets. Make calls from your iGoogle page. And much more.
4. Mobile integration - Sling your home POTS phone jack to your mobile phone. Make local POTS calls using your mobile phone from anywhere. No special phone required. Just use m.phonegnome.com on your cell phone - free.
5. Get your geek on - Despite being easy to use, PhoneGnome still has a lot to offer power-users too. SIP credentials for use with any softphone, ATA, Asterisk etc.. Give your home phone a Public SIP address for interop with SIPphone, Gizmoproject, Free World Dialup, Asterisk, Trixbox, PBX integration etc. Free calls to Gtalk, MSN, and Yahoo! IM users. ENUM and SIPbroker support, and more.

You’re paying for that landline, you might as well be getting something out of it besides 911 and power-outage fail over. The $99 PhoneGnome box lets you get the benefits of VoIP without giving up the reliability of a POTS landline - and lower the amount you spend on that landline to the bare minimum at the same time.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 23rd, 2008 at 9:49 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.