To replace the slow DSL we got cable a month ago, and I finally disconnected both the DSL and home phone today. The Verizon bill was $62.44 every month for DSL and home phone, but the cable internet bill is $45 a month. By dropping Verizon we are saving an extra $17 a month and we have faster internet. The home phone alone was $28, and considering we don’t use all of our cell minutes by a long shot, we decided to try being a “cell phone only” family. Worst case if we use up all of our 400 shared minutes ($60/month for 2 phones) then we can bump it up to 700 minutes for only $10 more, which is still a savings of $7 a month.

The best part of all? No more telemarketing calls! Almost 95% of the calls we got on the home phone were from telemarketers, it was ridiculous. My only real concern about dropping the home phone was 911 calling. They shut off our service immediately, so I tried my parents home phone. Didn’t even ring, and went straight to “you can’t call them” blah blah blah. So I decided to try 911. Now before you yell at me, I didn’t even let the call go through. Instead of giving me the error message, it rung! The second it started to ring I hung up, so it shouldn’t have even entered their system. Verizon wouldn’t tell me if this would still work, but it’s not in their best interest to say “oh yes, get rid of us and you can still call 911.”

And not to start a headset debate, but ours came today, and so far I’m impressed. I started to mess around with the voice dialing options on our phone, and it’s actually really cool. On old phones you had to record your voice for EVERY contact, but not on our Motorola W490s. When I say “Stacie” it reads my contacts on it’s own and matches it for me. So theoretically I can press a button on the headset, say “Call Stacie,” and never have to even look down at my phone. Way cool.