Cutting the land line (sort of)
Being old school—and just old in general—our family has always had a land line (i.e. Plain Old Telephone Service or POTS). We've also had the same POTS phone number for well over a decade, so it's the number that everyone uses to call us at home. Add in the fact that (at least until very recently) AT&T cell service at our home was marginal to poor, and there really wasn't much desire to cut our land line for all-cellular.
Until I looked at our bill, that is, and discovered that our POTS line was costing us over $30 a month. Even at that amount, we paid extra for caller ID, and still had to pay for long distance calls. So once AT&T upgraded the cell towers near our home, we started using our cell phones for all long distance calls. But still, our POTS number was well known to friends and family, so we didn't want to just kiss it goodbye. But that $30+ a month was basically a complete waste of money, so I started looking for other solutions.
Enter VOIP, or Voice Over IP. This technology has been around a long time, but I never really felt ready to make the move. Then I started looking into it, and found that I could save about 90% of the monthly cost of my POTS line, keep my phone number, and gain a number of useful features. That made the "go" decision quite easy to make; read on if you're curious about replacing a land line with a VOIP service.