Illustration: John Cuneo

Way before cordless phones, a 25-foot wire running from the wall to the handset cost me several dollars--every month. Back then, you rented your phone from Ma Bell. If you wanted a longer cable, you rented that too.

Today, voice options run from hollering down the hall to instant-messaging around the world. But force of habit kept me paying an outrageous $102 a month to Qwest, my local telco, for two landlines and services like call waiting that former monopolists still wildly overcharge for.

Every time I was on the verge of convincing myself to sign up for cheap Internet-based phone services, something would dissuade me--a Skype convert's garbled calls, a Vonage customer's lament about an all-day service outage, the wails of a friend whose cut-rate phone provider had gone bust.