It's well-documented fact that people don't like too much change in their lives. It's a natural instinct to be conservative in our lifestyles and when we do have to adopt some kind of change, we prefer the ones that don't cause too much shake-up to our habitual routines. So it was a bit of a shock to the system when I went ahead and changed my phone carrier, but I feel rather gratified in having taken the plunge.
A landline phone service shouldn't require rocket scientists to run properly, you'd think. Other companies seem to manage it, except the one I was with: for them the concept of having two people being able to talk to each other on a call was some alien or unfashionable concept to be discouraged at every opportunity. So after the final straw finally landing on my back, I ditched them completely and went for a VoIP phone system. I had some initial worries: what if I wasn't around to take a call? Would I be able to hear the other person clearly enough? Would I collapse in a heap of useless technophobia at the prospect of making calls via a computer?
Fortunately the hardest thing about it was deciding on which of the offered phone plans to try. I ended up deciding on a monthly contract to evaluate the service, with a view to extending this to a cheaper prepaid contract if I was happy, or giving myself the option of crawling back to a landline provider for reconnection. Being home for calls wasn't a problem. The voicemail downloaded anything I'd missed as soon as I connected and with the adapter they gave me, I was able to hook up a laptop to my VoIP account at work anyway.
Call quality turned out to be dependent on the local broadband connection. It was fine at home and at work, some public wifi spots did involve a bit of static, but with everyone using bandwidth that was hardly a surprise. I never had any calls where the caller and I couldn't understand each other, and what's more the softphone installation to use the VoIP service on the PC was really easy to use and configure.
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