For some baffling reason, our otherwise lovely house has only two phone jacks: one in the kitchen, and one (we just discovered a few days back) in the master bedroom. Neither of these are conveniently located for running a line to my home office. Since I'm not excited about a big cable running along the upstairs hallway, I started thinking about alternative options for getting phone service. So far I can think of:

• Some kind of magic WiFi or otherwise wireless telephone rebroadcaster. I didn't see anything like this at Fry's.
• GE makes a thing which rebroadcasts your phone signal across your electrical wiring. However, the box sez it doesn't work with Caller ID, and it also wasn't clear it was two-line savvy.
• Spending money on a 5.8GHz two-line base-station & satellite thingy. Not thrilling since we already a one-line version of same.
• Vonage or the Time Warner phone-over-cable option. Vonage is, to be blunt, cheaper.

So the most appealing option to me is to get a third satellite for our existing phone system for my office, and then to get Vonage service for the office proper. This is extra appealing because Vonage has this crazy "SoftPhone" add-on that is the laptop client for the service, and which works on a Mac. Hooooooray.

I guess another option -- if I wanted to get away from this whole "phone" thing -- would be to go straight for something like Gizmo, which is like $5 a month. I already have the Bluetooth headset, so, I mean, what the hell do I need a physical PHONE for?

Update: Gizmo doesn't offer (512) phone #s yet. Since it's my business line, that's arguably not that important, but it's enough to put me off anyway. Guess I'm buying a Vonage adapter tomorrow. Thanks for the feedback!

Update 2: I bought the Vonage adapter thingy, which came with a rebate, so in the end it'll cost me $15 or so. Setup was mostly painless, although Vonage's web site is set up in such a way that Safari doesn't recognize that there's a name/password combo to remember :(. Also, it turns out that the whole SoftPhone thing requires an ADDITIONAL phone line, it can't latch onto your "regular" Vonage phone line. I guess I could probably fake it by using the simultaneous call stuff -- we'll see how it goes. I do really like the voicemail -> e-mail stuff, though.  8:07:05 PM  (comments [])