Frugality in motion is a series of posts designed to give you practical ideas that you can implement in your every day life to save more money.

A few years ago I tried VoIP and really didn’t enjoy the quality of the service I got, but since then it’s improved exponentially. Now there’s very little difference between using a VoIP service and an actual land line. A few months ago I decided to ditch my land line and jump into the digital age. I purchased Sun Rocket’s internet phone service and thought I would share my review of the service with you.

The best part of Sun Rocket’s VoIP service is the simple and inexpensive pricing scheme. It’s $199.00 a year for unlimited calling. This includes everything, all of the features, and every bit of taxes. There are no hidden fees or unscrupulous charges. The $199 bill comes out to be a bit less than $17.00 a month, which is a great rate for long distance service. Don’t worry, you won’t have to commit $200 only to find out you don’t enjoy the service. If you cancel within a month of using the service, you get a full refund, and if you cancel in less than a year, you get a prorated refund for the amount of time that you didn’t use. They even pay for the shipping of the free wireless phone that they give you.

The benefits don’t end at the pricing either. In addition to the free 5.8 GHZ wireless handset they give you, you get unlimited calling to the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico. Now you don’t have to worry about cell-phone overages or running out of minutes. If you want to call outside of those areas, there are some great rates on international calls too. They even give you $3.00 a month worth of international calls for free!

You can also keep your existing phone number which is great, unless you get a lot of harassing calls from telemarketers and bill collectors on your existing line! There are a bunch of other fancy features that come with the service as well, including Voicemail, Call Waiting, 3-way calling, Caller ID, Call Waiting ID, Speed Dial, Call Forwarding, and just about everything you can possible think of. The voice mail service is spectacular, whenever someone leaves a message, you can have a .wav file emailed to you of the message!

There are a lot of great features, but there are some detractors as well. The service isn’t perfect, I’ve had a couple of outages that have each lasted a few hours and there were a couple of times I had to reset the “Gizmo” phone for it to work. It gets annoying every now and then, but for the price, I can handle it. In the event that your service goes down, you still get the emails of the messages, which is definitely a good thing.

Since Sun Rocket is a VoIP service, it cannot be entirely trusted to make 911 calls. It offers an enhanced 911 service that forwards your call to proper authorities in your areas, but if there was a power outage or your internet was down, you wouldn’t be able to call 911. If you have a cell-phone, this isn’t much of an issue, but you should definitely be aware of it.

Overall the service is pretty good. I’m saving about $20.00 a month on my long distance savings, and the additional features make for an overall great service. The infrequent service problems can be a bit annoying, but overall the service is definitely a good buy.