A lot of these pay one price forever startups claim a magical business model that's virtually free. Then they go broke.

The newer trend is to get rid of the landline and only go with cellphones.

And if the power goes out, your telephone no longer works.

No, thanks.

So far it sounds too good to be true, but I'm remain cautiously optimistic.

These parasitic technology ideas don't scale well. For a liberal public policy website, it's a little odd. If the goal is to put salon.com on the lunatic fringe, you're succeeding.

These guys haven't been able to make a real go of the Ooma-type business model after nearly three years. They started out selling a box for $139 and I watched the price drop all the way to $49 before they abandoned the box entirely.

I predict Ooma will join SunRocket in the VoIP graveyard in quite short order.

Should have been http://phonegnome.com/

As we all know by now. After a year you save money over Vonage, but it sounds like these guys may not have a year left...

We should all have Asterisk servers, and the government should terminate our numbers for us. Then the telcos could concentrate on data networks and let voice networks die.

The power issue is one we have a great deal of experience with here in Florida, and it's more complicated than you might think. Most people use wireless handsets now, so power over POTS doesn't help. Bell South (now AT&T) is running fiber right into the house now, so they aren't neccesarily providing power any more. And the battery stores at the central offices aren't as large or effective as they used to be anyway, so a 5 or 6 day outage might kill your phone even with POTS. Cell phones aren't much better, the battery backups for the towers only last about 4 to 6 hours under heavy use, which is what you get when 3/4 of a metropolitan area loses power.

Comcast has an interesting approach to the problem. They provide a cable modem/VOIP box with a built in backup battery good for 4 to 8 hours. If the battery dies from an extended power outage, they will come out and replace it as an urgent service call - in theory. The reality is that if we have a catastrophic event, the cable guys will all be very busy, and the electricity usually comes back on a lot faster than the cable does.