How to Use Google Voice and a $50 Obihai VOIP Adapter for Free Landline Phone Service
TLDR: replace your landline with a one-time $50 purchase.
10 or so years ago, we disconnected our landline. Our local company had been Pacific Northwest Bell, then Qwest, and finally CenturyLink. The service got worse - noise on the line, sometimes voices of other people, etc. - and it always got more expensive. Caller ID started at $5/month but it went up from there. We were paying about $30/month for relatively basic service when we stopped.
We replaced that with an Obahai VOIP adapter and service from Google Voice. Now, when we get reminder texts from dentists, doctors, schools, and so on, they go to the house line. When we get calls from schools, the cordless phones in the house ring. If we miss the call, the call is transcribed by Google and sent via email.
1. Decide on phone you're going to use
If you're still using a landline, you probably have cordless phones. If not, you might have cordless phones hidden away in storage. Or you might have given them away or sold them at a garage sale. If you need cordless phones, we bought something like this, only 15 or so years ago.
The sound quality is awesome. If I need to make a long call, I don't use my cell1. Instead, I use a cordless phone that is designed to let you hear and speak clearly, not for playing Angry Birds or Facebooking. It fits well between my shoulder and jaw, so I can use two hands. Or I can use the built-in speaker.
If you live in a small place, you might be able to get by with a corded phone. It's not a bad idea to have a corded phone and a cordless one: you'll always know where the corded phone is going to be. You use a small device called a phone splitter to plug into your VoIP adapter and then you have two jacks for phones.
2. Decide what adapter you're going to use.
We first used a Cisco PAP-2T adapter. While Cisco is/was the big name in routers and commercial VoIP systems, that adapter wasn't very good. I see they still make residential VoIP adapters but I wouldn't recommend them.
We replaced the Cisco adapter with an Obihai 200 VoIP Adapter. They for about $50 every day but if you look for them on sale you can find them cheaper. Should you buy a used one? Maybe. You can - and should - reset the adapter back to factory defaults. There's a lot of "knobs" - codecs, tone profiles, ring profiles, etc. - that the previous owner might have adjusted. They might have worked perfectly for them or they might have screwed things up and that's why they're selling it.