The New Landline: What Is VOIP?

Choire Sicha
The Awl
Published in
2 min readFeb 14, 2011

Sometimes, like once a day, my house phone rings! It usually rings about six times, and I go from “Ooh, someone’s calling me” to “Oh right, no one is actually calling me” by ring number two. The rest of the rings are just an interruption of key plot points to whatever PBS drama I am watching at the time. That is because I do not pickup my phone. Because no one even has the number. It rings all the time, with phone-spam and fake bill collection agencies and sales pitches disguised as surveys. And the fool is me, because I am actually paying for this annoying non-service. It’s not entirely my fault! The purveyors of the new Voice-Over-Internet phone lines haven’t done a good job explaining them to people like me who grew up with crazy things called “answering machines.” Now I will tell you how we can all save ourselves from the old landline.

Okay so! Your first surprise: it’s not unlikely that you’re already using VOIP and you don’t even know it.

Read the rest here.

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