To VoIP or not to VoIP?

Here is our first attempt at sharing some cost saving tips, if the response is good, more will follow!

How much do you spend on your phone bills every year? For those of us that make frequent phone calls to Malaysia and Singapore, the additional fees of international phone cards really add up to a larger phone bill than we expected.

For us, we subscribe to the SBC landline for $21.53 after tax, and recently it has increased to $23.22 after SBC merged with AT&T. So that adds up to $278.64 after tax, per year. I think that is the older rate, which is much lower than the current new rate under AT&T. As for our international phone card, we switched to the Purple Card after our cost-savvy sister-in-law introduced it to us. To date, we found that it is perhaps the cheapest reliable phone card available for calls to Malaysia (2.5 cents/min for landline, 5 cents/min for cell). On average we use up about $20 worth of calls every month, so that adds up to $240 per year (tax free, since purchased online), with a grand total of $518.64 per year of phone bills!

Realizing how expensive the phone costs can be, we started looking for cheaper alternatives online. There are, of course, many cheaper options available. One of the most popular and free service is Skype and the like (VoIP phones). However, not all the services, especially the free ones, match our requirements. In search of a better, cheaper phone service, we are looking for:

1. Service cheaper than our current rate by at least 20%


2. We don’t want to log into our pc every time we want to make a phone call, so that rules out pretty much all of the free services like Skype, Gizmo Project, VOIP Buster, jajar etc.


3. We should be able to use the phone just like a normal landline and make calls to other phones, not pc. This again rules out all of the free services…sob sob.


4. We want to retain our existing home number.


5. Must have E911.


6. Ability to call internationally, especially to Malaysia and Singapore for free, as an added advantage.

The first three criteria left us with VoIP service providers such as Vonage, Viatalk and SunRocket. And since SunRocket’s Sunspots gives us FREE UNLIMITED calls to Malaysia and Singapore, this seems to be THE choice to go! With $299 per year (no taxes, hidden fees, yay!), we will be saving $219.64 a year!

However, given the good bargain, there are still some concerns that make us reconsider our choice:

• Though calls to Malaysia and Singapore (and Australia too, to our relatives there!) landlines are free, it costs $0.08 per min to call Malaysia’s mobile and $0.03 for Singapore’s mobile.


• Phone will not work if there is power or internet outage. However, every modern human has a cell phone anyway, so we can live with this.


• We have to keep our expensive cable plan, instead of a cheaper DSL, which requires a traditional phone line. Since DSL is not available to our area for some stupid reason, this is not our concern for the time being.

So given the setbacks above, should we get a cheap local plan and continue using the Purple Card? A quick glance at the VoIP review page shows that the cheapest plan goes to Zingotel for $5.95, which includes free local and 100 min US and Canada. This totals to $191.40, giving us an even more substantial saving of $327.24 per year! However, the user review shows that it has probably the worst customer service…which we will definitely regret!

So, to VoIP or not to VoIP? That is the question.

What is your take on this?