With all of the things that are sucking money away from typical Americans these days, paying too much for phone service- especially land line phone service- is particularly galling. This form of communication, which is very basic these days, costs a surprising amount of money when you look at the cost of the service and then add in the excessive taxes involved. (In some states, taxes can make up as much as forty percent of the total phone bill!) When you look at the extra cost of all of the calling features that are so useful these days, it seems downright wrong that phone companies should be able to charge so much!

Despite the fact that conventional phone companies appear to have a monopoly in many areas, there is an alternative. That alternative is the cable TV company. Many cable TV companies, Comcast among them, provide the option of subscribing to digital phone service. The phone services offered by these cable TV companies are equivalent to what's offered by conventional phone companies in all of the important ways, yet present a much better deal.

First the ways in which phone service from cable TV companies is equivalent to service form phone companies. Phone service from a cable TV company provides clear sound (if anything, greater sound quality than that of conventional phone companies) thanks to digital technology. Also, unlike VoIP services, these cable TV phone services are one hundred percent compatible with the 911 system so that they can be completely reliable in the event of an emergency. They also use the same kind of phone equipment that conventional phone systems use and allow their users to keep the same phone numbers that they had before switching over. This makes switching to cable based phone services extremely convenient and easy.

The differences between the phone services provided by cable TV companies and those provided by conventional phone companies are mainly the cost and what you can get for any given amount of money. For instance, you can pay a certain amount of money for a basic phone line- one that doesn't have any special calling features of a good deal on long distance built in- from a conventional telephone company or you can pay about the same amount and get a full featured calling plan from a cable TV company. In this context, full featured means the inclusion of plenty of advanced calling features and often free domestic long distance.

The inclusion of free domestic long distance provides a huge resource for saving money because it essentially doesn't add anything to the monthly bill for calls made to numbers anywhere in the United States and Canada, as well as Puerto Rico in the case of many plans. That can provide a lot of savings relatively quickly!

Of course the calling features themselves are also very useful. For example, Caller ID will let you see who's calling you, Call Waiting will let you take important calls even if you're already on the phone, and Voice Mail will handle any calls that you don't want to miss, but don't want to take immediately. In many cases, you'll also be able to block calls from ringing through from unidentified numbers or numbers that you specifically block.

As you can now see, cable TV companies present some great alternatives to the conventional phone company.