Phone/internet advice

So you are talking land line, not mobile, correct?

Buckeye cable is offering 4mbps for 19.99 for 12mos. then you could use Magic Jack, which is only 19.99 a year.

AT&T has dsl for $30 with no term commitments, and Buckeye has phone service for $13 per month. You may want to go that route.

If you are moving to broadband for the first time, I suggest Buckeye Express. They have no contract, so if you don't like it, you just stop it. That goes for all their services. With just BEX, and nothing else you pay a premium. They can give you the price over the phone with taxes and everything too. Bikerdude mentioned ATT DSL with no contract, I haven't heard of that, but it might be worth it too depending on who your phone is through. Just please do not do magic jack. I know some long distance carriers (Qwest and Level 3) have had problems with them and do not route calls to them because of it.

I should add, this is a land line and I use a laptop (if that matters)I'm not opposed to giving up land line for cell, but I still only have a $55 budget. I know I'm living in the dark ages, but I don't have cable tv either. In case you haven't guessed, I'm also technologically challenged so I don't fully understand all my choices. This gives me somewhere to start though.

1) get High Speed internet (buckeye)
2) Get Skype or Magic Jack

2a) Skype offers a unlimited $2.99/month to make calls to other people. They offer an option to allow you to have a "landline number" This would cost extra, like $60/year

2b) magicjack has you purchase to hardware and the first year for $40 or less. Then after that you pay $20. With magicjack, im sure you get a phone number for others to call you. Of course, it reguires you to have a phone to plug into the "magicjack"

I use 1 and 2a. I pay for the 10.0 mb/s and just pay skype monthly. I have a cell with prepaid minutes which i use like a pager kinda. If im at home and someone calls me, I wont answer the cell but just call them right back on my skype.

I have also found that i can login on my family and friends pc and use my skype on their pc. It works great when traveling. now magicjack would kinda work the same way, but im thinking that most ppl have skype on their machines...than magicjack. so you would have to have the cd for the drivers n program and/or try to download it.

the $2.99 per month for skype can be reduced if you pay by year

Skype is totally worth it...just saying.

Ask for speed of internet when ordering. When I recently moved, I went from Buckeye to Att. Att goes through phone lines even if you don't have a land line. Anyway, they haven't updated to fiber optics at the new house and the speed is 1.5. It is slower than the post office. I hate it. I'm switching back to Buckeye a.s.a.p.

michl, you are not the only one living medieval on the internet. We have dialup at home (Buckeye) and we do NOT want cable TV. All of the package deals with high speed, phone & TV depend on one's willingness to pay for two services and get the third one "free."

We have settled on a routine of paying for dialup at home and then taking laptops to our favorite coffee shop with wifi about twice a month. There we watch Youtube, download updates, and look at the fancy stuff that's too slow to see at home.

We pay $20 for dialup and buy 4 cups of coffee for a total of $32 per month. Sometimes we get a pastry with that.

Every year around this time, we vow to do some homework and get an upgrade in the speed. A few conversations with the salesfolk usually dampen our enthusiasm. They are unable to mentally process anyone who does not want cable TV (or satellite or such) in their lives.

As for long distance, we use e-mail so often that we hardly need to call out of town. When we do, we use 10-10-987 for 5 cents a minute.

Have any of you tried Toast.net? I believe it is a local company.

Viola - check out their website (toast.net). They have dialup plans for under $15 a month, and it is headquartered in Toledo. One of the plans is $9.95/month.

If you're going to be stuck with dialup, might as well cut your bill in half.

Or you might be able to upgrade to DSL for close to what you currently pay. (I know they have DSL, just not sure what the rate is.)

I'd give them a try, but I don't think they service my neck of the woods. Plus we have cable TV packaged with our internet.

We've been using Toast.net since the late 1990s.

Dial up internet...10-10-987...land lines....

It's like I woke up in the way back machine.

slowsol...I can't speak for Viola, but for me, it's about living within your means. I thank everybody for thier input, and I will be looking into your suggestions.

Slowsol, come around on laundry day when we're hanging wet stuff out on the clothesline! Some of what we do is for pleasure (the clothesline -- no kidding!) and some choices are based on the principles of not working for "the man" every waking moment of our lives. Toledo is a GREAT place to live low on the hog ;-)

hey now, I have cable AND use a clothes line. Using the clothes line is how I pay for cable! lol

jr: does Toast.net offer DSL? When I first moved here I bought Toast.net dialup service just as a quick cheap way to setup an internet feed for basic email/browsing. Was happy with there service but ultimately went Buckeye for broadband.

We have never liked the bundle packages we have seen because we do not have a home phone and the bundles had other conveniences that we would pay for but not need. In addition to no home phone my wife and I use 1 cell phone but have a second cell phone through the same company that has 400 prepaid minutes that expire after a year and only cost $100 (both through Verizon). Since we will never use those minutes the monthly price for the second cell is just over $8.00.

We presently have :

AT&T - High Speed DSL (3MBS) - $19.95 month
1 Verizon Cell phone plan - $39 month (Unlimited talk – no text)
1 Verizon emergency cell phone with prepaid minutes that averages $8.33 per month
Direct TV – 2 year commitment with an average of $58 per month over that 24 month cycle. This is for Hi Def service.

Summary - 2 cell phones, internet and Hi Def satellite TV for $125.28 per month.

We have all the channels we wish to watch but not premium stations like HBO. We do not have texting but pay about .25 cents per text if I text in an emergency.

http://toast.net/services/dsl

I think we pay about $20 per month, but I'm not positive about that. Other services are probably faster, but this works for us. Skype is fine. Over Christmas, my wife and stepdaughter were streaming video from Netflix over the Wii just fine. Stepdaughter took Wii back to college.

I'm not interested in scheduled TV programming except for NFL games. So we only have bare bones cable service from Buckeye. That means good old fashioned radio for listening to tonight's game between Alabama and LSU, since we don't get ESPN. I mainly use TV to watch DvDs. We'll probably dump cable and stick with streaming video over the Internet.

We can still make local calls over our landline phone, but since we have no local family, we dumped long distance service years ago in favor of cell phones.

I still use a Tracfone or whatever it's called for my cell phone, since I rarely use a cell phone. It's expired now. Need to buy another card to add minutes. Even this setup is a rip-off. I prefer to use Skype to chat with family.

I also dry clothes outside on the line in the warmer months, which could almost include this month. Maybe I could dry clothes on the cable line coming to the house. If I could dry clothes over the Internet, then I would be set.

And we mason-jar can a lot of local produce during the growing season to enjoy year-round. I ate some of my wife's plum-apple jam this morning on toast.

Nothing wrong with mixing the old with the new.