Utilities

Land Line Telephone

Verizon is our phone company. If you have an internet connection, there are good alternatives to Verizon including Vonage, Ooma, Skype and services from Microsoft and Yahoo among others.

Verizon Regular Phone Service

Verizon is our local phone company and its main website for residential service is a very good way to manage your account and make informed choices about the service you need.  Verizon only provides the most basic services in our town.  "Advanced" services like voice mail are not available.  Verizon’s service works when the power is out so you can make a call during a power outage. The absolute cheapest eay to keep dial tone costs $13.85 a month but then you pay for every call but no one gets to pay that.  $50-100 per month is a more normal range.

Internet Based Phone Service (called VoIP), No PC Required

These services work just like your regular phone, except they don't work during a power failure.  You can get a local 576-xxxx number with these services or switch your existing 576-xxxx to this type of service. You can set it up to work with 911 emergency calls. They offer rich sets of features like caller ID, call forwarding, voice mail, which Verizon does not offer in Keene.  The savings will pay for most of your internet connection.

These services work best with the 2 meg or better service from KVVI.  Actually, it is the uplink speed of the 2 meg service that you need.  It is true that they will work with the 1 meg service but only it nothing else in the house is using the internet at the time of the call.....so your PC can't be doing some automatic update.  Your Roku box can't be downloading a movie.  Your children or spouse can't be doing something else on the PC, etc.  In our experience, trying to use this sort of service on a cheap internet connection drove us crazy.  We use the Ooma service with no monthly fee and use the saviings to get the best net connection from KVVI.

Vonage  currently (July 2010) offers plans as low as $9.99 a month.  It has a variety of very good  international calling plans that can be very attractive.  For example, you can get a number in Keene and a local number in the UK, making calls the the UK "local".  We use Vonage in Argentina and it works fine.  Others use it locally in Keene.  Initial costs are minimal.

Another similar service called Mconnect has been tested by KVVI and works fine.  It is quite inexpensive, about $10 a month.  Initial costs are minimal.

A relatively new service getting popular in Town is Ooma.  It offers free phone service but the initial cost is around $250.  With some special added services it can cost $10/month.  It uses inexpensive pre-paid accounts for very low cost international calling.  Free phone service like this will go a long way to paying your internet bill.  We had some startup issues with this service but now we love it.  I wouldn't go back to Verizon if they paid me.  One unique feature of Ooma is that you can use a basic dail tone line from Verizon (about $13 a month) as a low cost backup that will work during power failures.  Or, of course, cell phones.

All these services run using a box connected to your router or modem.  Seasonal residents can take the box home, connect it to their home router, and get calls on their Keene number at no cost all winter.  Or they can use a Vonage or Ooma box at home, bring it to Keene, connect it to the KVVI internet service here and just use their winter home number while there are here. To get the best deal, use one these boxes with 2 lines - one for Keene and one for your winter home.

PC Based Voice and Video Calling Services

These services require your PC to be running.

Skype offers voice and video calling for free or very low prices, world-wide, via your PC and the internet.  It will not work with the 911 emergency system.  Skype works by including your computer in it's system when you have Skype loaded.  Even when you are not using Skype, it will be using your machine.  The voice and video quality are excellent.  You can call worldwide ine phones, cell phones, send SMS messages, etc.  You can attach a phone to your computer to use with Skype, but the service needs your machine to operate. 

Microsoft offers Windows Live Messenger which does voice, video, IM, SMS messaging, chat, and so on.  Unlike Skype, it does not make use of your machine but your computer must be working to use the service. Yahoo Messenger offers a similar services as well.  We use both of these services for Spanish class in Keene with our teacher in Buenos Aires.  Lots of people use them for video calls with grandchildren for example.  Google Talk is similar.  There are a even more to choose from in addition to these, but these are the big ones.

We use these services for Spanish lessons with a teacher in Buenos Aires, twice a week, for two hours.  They work astonishingly well and cost nothing.