By Ande Jacobson

In late April, I wrote a piece about Community Phone talking about its benefits as a landline alternative. In short, Community Phone provides a landline-like alternative to customers that doesn’t require internet connectivity and can work for up to 12 hours without power using two major nationwide cellular networks. Although they use cellular networks, their service isn’t a mobile service. It’s fixed to the service address, and the network used is whichever of the two is stronger at that location. Their base is a strong receiver that connects to a traditional landline/analog phone. Their service provides excellent call quality at that location. It’s not quite the same as copper of course, but it is better than VoIP services that require active internet service. The concept is good.

That said, I need to revise my initial recommendation a bit by first saying that I have recently downgraded my plan to their standard service. While their premium service has some excellent additional features, the system running that level of service is not yet stable. In the six months or so that I had Community Phone’s premium service, many of the advanced features had not been available most of the time, and even some of the standard features running on their advanced system had not been reliable. The price depends on where your service is located, but in general, the premium service is about $10 more per month than the standard service. For both levels of service, there is a discount for paying annually rather than monthly that equates to one month free per year at the monthly rate. Continue reading →