How to ditch your landline and your phone bill but still have phones that work

Now here’s a potentially huge money-saver. I still have phone service through AT&T that rings through old-fashioned phones (you know, like the kind you see in a museum) because there’s nobody that’s going to give me a wireless plan with unlimited minutes for about 30 bucks a month.

But, still, that’s $360 a year. I’m sure there are things I’d rather do with $360 a year if I could free that up, right?

What if I were to tell you that you could buy a device that costs less than $100 (potentially as little as $38) and you could make phone calls for free using your Internet connection?

You better believe I’m interested.

For me, the drawback is that lately, it seems like I’m sending faxing back and forth at least once a month. There are lots of places that let me send faxes, including a store that’s literally only a minute away, but it’s still a hassle, and they charge $1-$1.50 per page.

The $38 model doesn’t support faxing. You can try it, but the usual result is a bunch of blank pages on the receiving end. The trick is stepping up to the premium 202-level product (which is still around $100) and finding a VOIP provider who supports T38, which is a special flavor of VOIP that compresses the data in such a way as to not confuse fax machines. (The linked article is wrong.)

The problem is finding a VOIP provider that does T38 at a price that’s lower than what I’m paying for U-Verse right now. I haven’t found one that does T38 for less than $40 a month, which is about what I’m paying for U-Verse. I don’t know if U-Verse supports T38, but I’ve been sending faxes successfully with it for months.

I suppose the other option is to use an Internet-based fax service, such as Faxzero, for those times when I can’t just e-mail a document. For $300 a year, it’s a problem worth solving.

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