
I’ve got a friend who is paying $88/month to AT&T U-verse for slow internet and phone service. He wanted to reduce his bill and so we tried this solution.
Charter has a new $20/month internet promotion, so we called and signed up for it. They also charge you $50 for installation and $17/mo for a cable modem and router. We decided to buy our own modem and router for about $150 total and save the monthly charges. When we were done with the installation we tested the connection and were getting 41 Mbps download and 3Mbps upload – FANTASTIC. He was used to a 3 Mbps download with AT&T.

To get phone service we decided to try Magic Jack Plus. It costs $69 at Walmart and includes one year of service – after that it is $30/year. Make sure you get the Plus version as this allows you to connect it to your router directly and don’t need your computer to be on.
The installation is fairly straight-forward if you follow the instructions. They will try and sell you numerous add-ons – just stay no – be careful what you click on.
This will get you a new phone number. If you want to transfer over your old phone number to Magic Jack you can do that also for a fee of $20. They offer you that in the initial setup, but we declined since we wanted to make sure Magic Jack was working in the first place.
To transfer your number go to My.MagicJack.com and Click the “My Subscriptions” tab, and then the “Details” button under “Transfer Your Phone Number to magicJack”. Follow the prompts to submit your transfer request.
My friend received an email from Magic Jack saying that it might take up to ten days to do the transfer, but I tested the phone number about 36 hours later and the phone number had been transferred. For some reason though the phone did not seem to be ringing, although I could leave a message. – My friend later got an email that said she had to unplug her Magic Jack and plug it back in for the phone to work. Now the phone is working correctly.
My friend now has reduced his yearly bill from $88/month to $23/month – quite a savings. Do keep in mind that you will need an initial investment of $290 for the router, modem and Magic Jack Plus, porting your old phone number over, and cable installation.
Also keep in mind that in twelve months, you’ll have to call Charter up and bargain with them for their best rate.
Note – one thing we noticed is that AT&T seemed to be using Charters cable for AT&T’s service. When we hooked up Charter, then we lost the AT&T service.