In December WBB subscriber Jerry Akman asked readers of our newsletter for suggestions on reducing the cost of maintaining his Verizon telephone landline in his vacation home on Wintergreen Mountain. He carefully investigated several alternatives and was kind enough to share what he learned. Here's his report:

We have had Verizon landline service since we bought our condo on Wintergreen mountain almost 30 years ago. As we can use our cellphones from our condo, we had the most minimal Verizon plan—911 service, no long distance and per call charges for local calls.

For this minimal service, after a rate increase from Verizon, our monthly service fee including taxes, fees, etc., (but not counting any per call charges) was $33, or $400 per year. So, we decided to explore alternatives and, after reading the reviews for Ooma and Magic Jack, we decided to try out Magic Jack’s service.

We bought a Magic Jack adapter at Best Buy and signed up for Magic Jack service. The Magic Jack service includes unlimited local and long distance (US and Canada) service. It also includes 911 service for an extra annual fee. The adapter cost $40, which includes one year of service. After one year, we have to pay either yearly or for multiple years. Right now that would be about $40 per year. The Magic Jack service operates through wifi, so it requires separate internet service, which we have through Nelson Cable.

We hooked up the Magic Jack service about five weeks ago to our Nelson Cable internet router/modem and the Magic Jack service seems to be working okay.

Incoming and outgoing calls have been fine—we could hear callers well and people we called said they could hear us well. I think the Magic Jack service includes an answering feature, call waiting, and some other features, but we have not used those features (the phone we use with the Magic Jack service has its own answering machine).

The 911 service charge is presently an additional $9 per year. After checking with Wintergreen Police to make sure I wouldn’t be disturbing anyone with a test 911 call, I called 911. My 911 call was routed to the Nelson County 911 dispatcher, who told me that their display showed our Wintergreen address and, in a emergency if we called 911, they would pass the call over to Wintergreen Police, who also alerts fire and rescue.

Aside from the Magic Jack adapter, we did not have to buy any additional equipment. Our old cordless phones work fine; we simply plugged the base station of the cordless system into the Magic Jack.

The one minor drawback is that we cannot use any of our wired landline phones, so we have to give up wired extensions in each of our bedrooms. We could solve that problem by buying more cordless phones, but we really don’t need them.

One problem we had was in trying to port our long-standing Verizon number (which we wanted to keep) to the Magic Jack service. That cost an additional one time charge of $20. As the address for our Verizon bills is not the same as our Wintergreen address, I had to call Verizon to find out how the service address is recorded in their records because the request to Magic Jack to port the number could not be affected if the address Magic Jack passed on to Verizon did not match Verizon’s records. In any event, once we had that straightened out, everything seemed fine and the old Verizon number was ported to our Magic Jack account.

One possible drawback for those who might be considering changing to Magic Jack or some other similar service is the fact that the Magic Jack service is only as reliable as your internet service. If the internet service goes down (e.g. there is a service interruption or the electricity goes out), the Magic Jack service will not work, which also means you will be cut off from 911 service. Since installing the Magic Jack service, we have had some temporary service interruptions when our Nelson Cable service was disrupted for reasons that are not clear. The Verizon landline service seemed to be more reliable in this respect. However, for our purposes, we think that a modest risk in that we can use our cellphones as a backup.

Finally, we were told some time ago by someone at Wintergreen that, if you give up your Verizon landline, Verizon will not let you re-subscribe as they clearly favor their wireless network. I do not know if that is correct (as a public utility, I would think they would have to offer service to anyone who requests it but I am not sure about that either). So if the option of returning to Verizon landline service is important to anyone, they might want to check this issue before relinquishing their Verizon landline service. –Jerry Akman