When the Medicare open enrollment period started our AT&T landline became a never ending robocall nightmare (40 calls a days). We contacted AT&T and asked if we could add something to our account to combat the robocalls and was informed they were unable to help. Sure, they make a lot of revenue from robocalls why would they want to limit them. To add injury to insult AT&T landline bill is now increasing to $91.74/month in December 2023.
After some online research it appears the best alternative was to switch our landline phone number over to a VOIP carrier service. The concern was that the voice quality would suffer from what we have come to expect from our landline. VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) uses your existing internet connection rather than the telephone service interface. To insure you get acceptable voice quality your internet provider has to have a sufficient upload speed greater than 10Mb/s and low latency less than 30mS. Our Spectrum Internet seems to meet these requirement and offers a VOIP service $19+/month. Well $19 beats $90, so I signed us up for the switch. The next day, I cancelled my order. What was supposed to be a painless switch was going to include an additional $60 technician service call to touch our existing hardware which already supports VOIP. It was going to take 3 days and $60 for what should be immediate and remote. What a SCAM! Some more research and I was considering Vonage and AXvoice. Both offered robocall filtering and AXvoice was less than $10/month plus a FREE adapter and a 15 days try and cancel policy.
Well, the AXvoice FREE adapter has a $20 Fedex shipping charge attached and arrived within 2 days. They let you pick a secondary phone number to use forever and to try the service before moving your existing landline number over (another $15 charge) In total, I paid just under $180 for an entire year of VOIP landline service. AT&T would be $1100 for 1 year of service. Then next year AT&T would be higher again and I would have everything in place and likely pay something around $100 for AXvoice.
Voice quality is excellent, price is incredible, Robocall blocking is questionable and documentation very limited. Thank goodness setup is a breeze even without documentation. The support Team at AXvoice suggested I look into NoMoRoBo.com for FREE robocall blocking. Which almost works and now if the caller is found in their database they disconnect (automatically hang-up) after the first ring. I can live with that. Every 1 ring call I feel like I'm winning the robocall battle. And with limited testing (medicare open enrollment ended) they get it right 50% of the time. There are a few frustrating items that you need to consider before signing on to AXvoice. The caller ID is another $1.50 a month add-on and is mutually exclusive with NoMoRobo.com This is interesting because they are loosing that feature revenue until they fix it. Also, the incoming call Black List doesn't work with wildcard characters. If you want to block all toll free 8xx numbers putting 8** *** **** in your black list doesn't work. There is zero information available and customer support seems to only answer one question per email. You will have to manually add number to your blacklist by logging into the AXvoice website.
If you want to keep a landline and save a few bucks, check out nomorobo.com first and then look into their supported carriers. Each carrier has a different approach. AXvoice is camping on Vonage rather than having their unique carrier simultaneous ring number. I'm not sure what the agreement is there but it seems to work. The way this works is that any call to my existing landline number simultaneous rings a unique toll free NoMoRobo number and they can end the call by disconnecting immediately after the first ring.
Are you already using a VOIP landline? Please share your experience with our community so we can make informed decisions.