Saturday, September 06, 2008

Good bye, Lingo, I'll miss you

Today, I canceled my Lingo account. So, if you've have a phone number for me that ends in 0016, you should get rid of that number; it's disconnected.

Lingo is a great service. I've been a long time customer (back when their service wasn't great) and stuck with them while they matured. For less money than I pay for local service, I got all kinds of great and useful features like:
  • simultaneous ring
  • call forwarding
  • caller ID
  • call waiting
  • free, unlimited local and long distance calling
  • free, unlimited international calling to western and central europe
  • voice mail to email
  • voice mail notifications by text message
  • and more
Again, for less money than I paid for local phone with call waiting, caller ID and call waiting call ID I got all that.

So, why did I leave them? Total cost of phone service. My company pays for my cell phone. I love Skype (the quality is great and the rates are excellent). I use Grand Central, so all the phones ring at once and I get visual voice mail. I don't really need 3 phones. GrandCentral, Skype and my cell phone are good enough.

What do I lose out on? I lose the ability to use a real phone. I lose some free international calling (which I've only used to call Switzerland for work and I don't do that any more). Will I miss that? Nope.

I would recommend Lingo service to anyone who wants phone service, with lots of features included and wants to use a real phone. I'd recommend Skype to anyone who wants great phone service cheap and is willing to use a headset.

In this day and age, there are all kinds of technologies for voice communication. You don't have to pay a bunch for phone service any more and you can get service that fits your needs. And now, I'll be saving some dough.

If you've got questions about how they all work(ed) together, let me know. I'd be happy to share my experiences!

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