Its time to fire your mother.

Well, not your real mother, but that other mother whos ruled you with a copper fist for most of your life: Ma Bell.

Dont get me wrong; you can appreciate everything the Bell phone companies have done for you over the years. Life would be bleak and you wouldnt be able to work or keep up with family and friends without your telephone service.

Some of you may be old enough to remember rotary dial phones and having to get an operator to make a long distance call. Maybe youre not old enough to have been on a party line, but you may remember your parents or grandparents talking about having to share a line with their neighbors.

My, how times have changed. And now you can kick Ma out of your home and office for good. Not to switch exclusively to using a cell phone as many have (a new email is making the rounds that tells of another scientific study showing prolonged cell phone use can cause brain tumors), but because you can have VoIP!

You may not be the kind of person who embraces a new technology right away, so it doesnt have to be a sudden breakup with Ma Bell. You can keep her on for while if youre afraid to cut the fiber optic umbilical cord and unconditionally accept this new broadband telephone technology until you know how it works.

Thats what I did. For a while I had two telephones on my desk: the Bell phone for incoming calls and my VoIP phone for outgoing calls especially for long distance, since it now costs nothing.

Once you have Voice over IP you wont be able to imagine paying anything to make long distance calls in the U.S. and Canada, or paying $80 or more a month to get a few hundred minutes of long distance on a cell phone.

If you have a contract with a Bell company or reseller, you may be hesitant to buy out the contract. But do the math. Figure out how much it will cost you to buy out the contract (mine charged $20 for each unused month). Then figure out how much youll pay if you stay with that company for the length of the contract. Subtract the cost of the buy-out and thats how much money youll save in the long run.

You can probably cut your phone bill in half and have a clearer phone line. If you have a separate long distance company, you can fire them immediately because youll get unlimited local and long distance with VoIP for a flat, low monthly rate.

You may worry that when theres a power or cable outage, your phone wont work. True, but youll have a control panel that you programmed to tell your VoIP server to automatically forward your calls to your cell phone when the VoIP connection is out.

So, maybe its time for you to join 17-million other VoIP user and say, Sorry, Ma, weve grown up and were moving on.

Copyright 2006. Annette Estes. All rights reserved. Permission to reprint granted as long as entire article and tag line are included.