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Got broadband? Add phone service for $0/month. By Dave Mathews

These days, many people don’t even have landline-based telephone service; they get all their calls on their mobile and office phones. But once I settle in at home, I want people to be able to call me on a nice, comfortable cordless phone, even if it’s lost in the couch. At home, the cordless battery is always charged, and it doesn’t matter if I’m in a fringe mobile service area.

Illustration by Damien Scogin

If you already have a broadband connection, you can get a home phone without paying for POTS (plain old telephone service) or a Vonage-style digital phone service. Here’s how to do it the easier way, without having to run your own private branch exchange (PBX) Asterisk server.

Roll Your Own

To roll our own free VoIP, we’re going to configure

some telephone adapter hardware, sign up for some free internet services, and reconfigure our broadband router. It’s not the simplest arrangement, and routers can be unforgiving, so follow these directions closely.

1. Acquire the phone hardware. You can use either a SIP (session initiation protocol) VoIP phone from Pingtel, Linksys, or Polycom, or an analog telephone adapter (ATA) from Linksys/Sipura or Cisco. Make sure the device is not locked to a provider. Adapters from Vonage are subsidized and therefore cheaper, but won’t work with outside applications unless someone unlocks them. Expect to spend about $50 on eBay for an unlocked ATA. I chose the Sipura SPA-2000 ATA, which has 2 phone jacks on one side and an Ethernet jack on the other.

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