Cheapest residential phone service

While most areas are still served by only one traditional landline phone company, digital technology has enabled a number of good alternatives. This includes the option taken by the 25% of households who have totally abandoned their home phone service and gone 100% wireless.

On this page, we display home phone service offers from cable and VoIP companies. The latter tends to be significantly less expensive in the long run even though the technology (digital transmission of voice) used is similar. (VoIP plans can be particularly cost-effective for those that make a large number of international calls.) However, the cable company service is often across dedicated servers that prioritize phone calls, while the VoIP companies tend to transmit across the public Internet. In both cases, a high speed Internet connection is required for the service to work.

For those keeping their traditional landline service who want to try and save some money, see the links below for inexpensive alternatives for domestic and international long distance. It may also be worth investigating whether it makes sense to bundle the landline with other services offered by the phone company.