If you’ve been looking for a way to reduce your monthly phone bill without sacrificing features on your phone service, you might want to look into companies that offer phone service based on Voice over Internet Protocol technology- or VoIP for short. Voice over Internet Protocol technology is offered by several different companies including Vonage, Lingo, and SunRocket. While they all have different service plans, prices, and features; there are also a number of general features that they have in common. For example, all of them offer lots of extra features included in there service plans at no extra cost, and those service plans are generally competitive in price with what you’d pay for a normal land based phone line from a conventional phone company.

VoIP technology, as implemented by these companies, includes as standard features many of the things that you’d pay extra for in order to get from a conventional phone company. Voice mail, caller ID with name, last number dialed calling, call transfers, call forwarding, call waiting, and a lot more are all included among these features. Not only are all of these features included, but they’re also made enormously more flexible because their settings can be changed and used from anywhere by accessing your account online. For example, you can use any computer with an Internet connection to initiate call forwarding. This is a great feature for situations where you need to have calls to your home or office number forwarded to your mobile phone, but forgot to do it before stepping out the door. You can also often do things like turn off the ability to dial international calls or directory assistance from your online account in order to save money. Some services also allow you to access your voice mail through your online account or have it forwarded to your email. When one service forwards voice mail to your email account it does so with the actual voice mail message attached as a WAV file so that you can listen to the message right there on your computer. At least one service will let you block phone calls from certain numbers and or calls from numbers that don’t offer any caller ID data. Either of those two features are great ways to fend off telemarketers or admirers who are just too aggressive for your comfort.

While all of these features are extremely valuable, one thing that all VoIP services have in common, and the feature that was really the whole point of them to begin with, is the ability to make long distance phone calls without any long distance rates. This is possible because of the “Internet” in Voice over Internet Protocol. Essentially, VoIP technology streams phone conversations in both directions over the Internet in real time. This means that those phone conversations are treated just like any other media that’s sent over the Internet. Just like MP3’s, digital photographs, emails, and other types of document that inhabit the Internet, there aren’t any long distance charges for phone conversations using VoIP. Best of all, it’s completely compatible with the conventional telephone network so you can still talk to people who don’t use VoIP.

When it comes to saving money and providing the maximum number of extra features, VoIP technology is definitely worth looking into.