Telecom Bill Broken Down

Because of the flurry of interest, here's more detail on our family telecom bill and how it will be transformed.

Service Current Charges New Charges Savings
Cingular National 1250 moving to FamilyTalk 850
Both include rollover minutes, unlimited Cingular mobile to mobile (46 million Cingular customers)
79.99 (main)
29.99 (second)
27.60 (taxes, misc)
59.99 (main)
9.99 (second)
18.00 (approx. tax, misc)
no setup charge
67.60
Home phone
Includes voice mail, Caller ID
33.74 33.74 0.00
Home long-distance
Via Opex at 5 cents a minute
20.00 (average month) 0 20.00
Vonage
Moved from work to home, unlimited long distance
27.24 27.24 0.00
Home business line for Lynn's work
Includes voice mail
65.00 5.25 (second line added to Vonage) 59.75
Total 283.56 154.21 129.35

This doesn't include incidental savings using SkypeOut for international calling and calling on the road. I'll be taking my noise-canceling USB headset when I travel so that I can use Skype instead of a cell phone when needing to make calls. Also, we'll think about SkypeIn (an inbound Skype-based phone number) when they add this capability in July 2005.