Have you added up your phone bills lately. In the old days, phone bills may have been high, but we only had to pay for one of them. These days, we tend to have a house phone. We also have cell phones for the family. This can really add up!

But there are a lot of ways to reduce this bill today. In the old days, almost everybody had to have a traditional landline. Then we started to get cell phones. Of course, we then decided our teens needed phones too. This all got very expensive. All of this is changing now.

What are some alternatives to old fashioned home phone service? A lot more families are just losing their landlines and relying upon alternatives. Are you familiar with them?

These days, many people just use a cell phone. They do not even have a home phone. There are many affordable plans for families. They find that, these days, cell phone service provides an affordable and easy to manage choice. These people do not even have a home phone in the traditional sense any more.

Other families are changing their house phone over to an internet phone. Sometimes you can keep your old phone number, but sometimes you have to change it. These types of services have a monthly charge. But beyond that, calls are free.

The fees for internet based phones vary by provider, but are usually a lot lower than traditional land lines, especially when you add up the charges for calls, taxes, etc. You may find that your internet company or cell phone company has a service like that. Many companies will offer package deals for multiple services which can help too.

There are also phone services you can use on your PC with an internet connection. The basic services are usually free. You can call others with the same service on their computer. You may have to pay extra for the ability to call traditional or cell phones, but it is not very expensive.

One benefit to computer based phone services is that you can even use it in video mode. The picture phone technology is here, but you usually need to access it on your PC. If you do not want to show your video, you can swith this off with a simple click of your mouse.

Technology has given us lots of new alternatives for our phone service. We all want a simple, convenient, and reliable way to make phone calls. But we do not want our bills to get out of control!