As many of you know, I use a special telephone called CapTel. This phone translates voice to text and makes it easier for us hearing disabled to use the telephone. I wrote a post about it here.

The other day, I was in the Verizon store to get some accessories for my Droid 2 when I happened to notice a poster in the window for a new service called Home Phone Connect.  What this does is it allows you to keep your land-line number but use your wireless service….all for one easy payment of $19.99 a month!  That is a huge savings from the $47 or so a month I was paying just for local call service.

There was only one problem.  No one at the Verizon Phone Store heard of CapTel!  I actually lugged the phone there just in case we needed to try it and they all gathered around me looking at this contraption with a screen.  It looked like a bunch of Trekies gathering around admiring the newest invention of the 60s when Star Trek was king.

Here is the funny part…we couldn’t test it out because the store did not have the wireless modem set up for demo purposes.  And, it would take three to five business days for the service to be switched over.  All I had to do was check the land-line to see if there was a dial tone.  So now…we have a phone they aren’t familiar with, a service they weren’t sure would work and we’re all standing around trying to figure what to do next.  To make a long store short, one of the managers agreed to let me switch the service to see if it will work and if it didn’t, to switch back without penalty.

Three days later…land-line check…NO dial tone!  We are in business!  Plug the modem in, wait for it to boot up, plug the phone in and VOILA!  I made my first phone call to make some hotel reservations for a family reunion.  And here are the captions streaming ever so gracefully…with their faithful seven to ten second delay.

The moral of the story…if you are looking to ditch your expensive land-line, eliminate one phone bill but still need the CapTel phone, go with Verizon Home Phone Connect!