So, I'm trying to figure out how to get cheap home phone service using VoIP. We switched to just cell phones a while back, but the reception and cost weren't satisfactory. We have Google Voice accounts associated with those phones. The Google Voice accounts are nice since they give number portability regardless of cellular provider (in the same way that gmail gives email portability no matter who your ISP is). It would be nice to have the same for the house number, but it turns out we can't port that into Google Voice, and we don't want to change home numbers.

But anyways, we want a permanent home number. We previously had Vonage, which is VoIP, but it seems to be a ripoff (though arguably less of one than what the Cable ISP offers, which as far as I can tell is also VoIP, but they force you to use their combined cable modem/phone adapter unit). But since we had Vonage we have an ATA adapter (the Linksys PAP2 model), that was/is locked to using the Vonage service. So I'm thinking about starting with the hardware and seeing if I can unlock it to use with some other service. This might be backwards and maybe I should be looking at it from the services perspective first.

I guess we will see how this unfolds.