After living the past 5 years (or so) without a home phone, Joelle and I decided we really wanted one. There’s a few reasons:

• We talk independently to each others family, friends, etc… since they call our cell phones, not a shared line. We miss just being the person to answer the phone and saying “hey!” and catching up.
• Unlimited minutes, fairly cheaply (we are using T-Mobile’s Talk Forever service, which is in Seattle and Dallas only for right now - though, supposedly, it is going to go nationwide on the 14th of May. You do need to have T-Mobile for cell phone). It is unlimited minutes from home, both local and long-distance, for only $10/month, so it is much, much cheaper than using the phone service or Comcast’s service (which was the reason we went away from having a home phone in the first place - they are so expensive!)
• The unlimited minutes would have been even more important this past month with me being at home so much. It was the first time I, for one, have ever gone over minutes. This should mitigate that for the future.
• Often, it is just a lot more comfortable to talk on a normal phone. We picked up some clearance cordless phones (with extendable # of handsets) from Office Max, so we can use the phones around the house.
• Another benefit we realized is that it is sometimes hard to hear someone when they are talking on the main floor of our house, when the other person is in the basement. With our new fancy schmancy new clearance phones, we can intercom to each other. Cool :)
• I wanted a new router anyway (I’ve been using a pretty old model for testing purposes for work), and this comes with an optimized one for the service (it has VOIP, or Voice Over IP, optimization built-in). It seems to be holding up pretty well - I am impressed.

So there you have it, we are now proud owners of a new home phone number! If you want to know it (and we know who you are), shoot one of us an email.

Don’t worry - our cell phones aren’t going anywhere. This is just an added option for us…