magic jack, FTW!
We have it at home and just dropped our regular phone line. Just as long as you can have stand alone DSL, its worth it. Its 40 bucks for the equipment and the first year of service is included. Every year thereafter is 20 bucks OR you can pre-pay for 5 years for 60 bucks so in the end it comes out to be like 1 dollar a month.
There are only 2 issues:
1) it doesn't work 100% with the newest phones, but most phones made from like a year ago and before will work just fine. I've talked to support about this and its because a standard landline actually provides power to the phone and the magic jack doesn't give as much power so some newfangled phones do not receive the "message" to ring. The phone will light up when it receives a call, but will not ring.
This is somewhat isolated and only affects maybe 5% of existing phones. The solution to this is to hook up the MJ to a powered USB 2.0 hub.
2) your computer has to be on if you want to be able to receive and make calls. I recommend hooking up the MJ to a laptop with low power consumption where you can just leave the monitor on off all the time.
For international calls, i recommend buying a MJ for your international friends, setting it up here, then mailing it to them so that they now have a US number, then they can call and receive calls for free ^_^
