VOIP SO far

Well, this was easy. On Wednesday our phone number was moved from AT&T to Phone Power. I got home, went out outside and pulled the RJ11 plug outside. This plug tied the outside lane to the inside line. Then I plugged the phone line from the the provided Grand Stream device into the phone plug in the wall and we had phone service across the house. And it sounds great!!!

The VOIP experiment

I am always looking at ways to save money on utilities; we have switched telephones a couple of times to get reduced bills. We had BellSouthl and I have watched the bill grow each year especially as AT&T took over. Why am I paying 20% more than I was three years ago.

I have been looking at VOIP and decided it was time. Time Warner offers it but when I called them they could not port my number. I did a bunch of research and came up with two things:

1. There are a bunch of vendors; Vonage was not the top. I choose Phone Power. Out of the LA area; small vendor with lots of experience.

2, It was recommended that I change out the firmware on my Linksys router. So I did I am now running DD-WRT.  there is a great deal of help on the Internet to help out with it. It was little harrowing and my wireless connection has needed to be upgraded to new firmware as well. But so far so good.

Now for the real fun; I have the Phone Power up and running on one phone and I think it sounds ok. But I need to unwire the phone system from AT&T to run on the internal network Sounds scary but again lots web pages with instructions. It will be interesting.

So hopefully mid-week we kick AT&T to the curb.

Reviewing our Movie watching paradigm

So, five months ago we ditched Blockbuster and keep HBO and Starz. We are onto a new experience. We ditched HBO and Starz both. Paying $22 for the two, with mainly me and Anna watching them. I love HBO but I have to come to realize that the release time between major movies on DVD and HBO was increasing (the DVD window has shrunk significantly) and for some reason HBO has really reduced the quantity and quality of original programming. I loved Starz for its quantity of movies but again most of them were retreads. So, I think we are heading back to Blockbuster All Access.