This week I moved away from my traditional landline with AT&T to the voice-over-IP (VoIP) service, Vonage. I’ve been thinking about doing this for a long time – and now I have, I don’t know why I didn’t do it before.

For those of you who don’t know, Vonage supply you with a box, and this box hooks up to your broadband router. Instead of you plugging your home phone into the wall, you plug it into this box and you use the phone in exactly the same way as your traditional method ? but with many extra features besides.

Personally, I always had a mental block about moving away from this traditional type of phone line. This is crazy as I love technology, gadgets and always want to embrace new things. However, having a line fixed to the wall was something hard to get away from.

I’m so far glad I did.

Because we phone outside the USA often – mainly to mainland UK, our phone bill with an international tariff was around $80 a month, $960 a year. Vonage has a flat rate, free unlimited calls tariff anywhere in the USA, Canada, Puerto Rico, Italy, France, Spain, UK and Ireland for $24.99 with the first month free. That’s $274 for the first year. Which, I calculate will save us around $680 a year. It became a ‘no-brainer’ to me.

I simply ordered online and Vonage arranged the porting of our home AT&T number to the Vonage service, sent me the box by express UPS and within around five days it was a ?go?. The number transferred on a pre-determined day and Vonage cancelled our service with AT&T. Seamless. The setup is simplicity itself.

I?ve been very impressed with the new service. Call quality is superb. The extra features all controlled via your online account are equally impressive. The ability to get your voicemails sent to you immediately by email is my favourite feature. If something goes wrong with your network connection or your box, you can program an alternative number (such as your cell phone) as backup. You can make a call ring many different numbers at once such as home, cell, work. You can setup schedules to determine when you want to be bothered ? or send callers direct to voicemail and you can block anonymous callers. There really is a fair bit of functionality that I?ve yet to explore.

Basically, though, nothing changes, apart from the cost. You pick up the phone and make and receive calls at home in the normal way. You can make it as simple or complicated as you like,

I’ll unashamedly plug the service. If you sign up by clicking this banner, we?ll both get a month?s extra free service.

Update 26 January: Just called Vonage to give a referral from a friend. Both my friend and I got a credit of $49.98 – two months free. That brings my annual saving for my home phone to around $730.