Get two years of unlimited home phone service for $199
ViaTalk is offering a free second year of voice-over-IP phone service when you sign up for one year at $199.
If you've been thinking about saving money on phone service by switching to voice over IP, allow ViaTalk to entice you: Sign up now for the standard $199-per-year rate, which includes unlimited local and long-distance calling, and you'll get a second year free.
In case you're unfamiliar with them, VoIP services leverage your broadband Internet connection to let you make and receive phone calls. The experience is virtually identical to using a landline, and in most cases you can keep your existing number.
ViaTalk provides a boatload of calling features as part of their "vt_unlimited" plan, everything from voice mail and caller ID to call recording and scheduled wake-up calls. You also get a free phone adapter, which plugs into your router or broadband modem.
Last summer I reviewed ViaTalk for PC Magazine, and dinged them pretty heavily for poor customer service. But things have improved considerably since then, and I haven't needed customer service even once in over 7 months. (Full disclosure: I'm a ViaTalk customer, but otherwise have no affiliation with the company.)
Bottom line: ViaTalk was already a deal at $199 per year, but $199 for two years? Well, that's twice as good. Of course, if you really want to talk cheap (and don't need all the fancy features), look no further than the MagicJack, which offers a full year of service for just $40 (and $20/year after that).