Affordable Home Security For You

We live in a dangerous world. You get reminded of this every time you open the newspaper or turn on the TV news. There is a constant undercurrent of local crime that includes burglary and home invasion. If you've ever been a victim of someone entering your house and stealing something or causing damage, you know how unsettling and insecure it makes you feel. If you've ever been attacked... well, that's an order of magnitude worse. But what can you do to prevent becoming a victim of this scourge of local crime activity?

One high tech solution is to create an electronic barrier around your home that will sound the alarm if anyone dares invade your sanctuary. The mere presence of a home security system may act as a deterrent to crooks that are nervous about being caught and are looking for the easiest and least risky targets. The more daring will encounter a shrieking alarm they can't turn off and the knowledge that the police are being summoned even as they stand there plotting their next move. If you happen to have the misfortune of being at home when someone tries to penetrate a door or window, you can have an option installed that let's you communicate with a security center dispatcher without even having to touch the equipment.

Technically, what's involved? The latest systems are all wireless. That means that the different components communicate via radio waves. It won't do a burglar any good to look for sensor wires to cut. There aren't any.

The components of a basic system include door and window opening sensors that do just what they say. Someone tries to get in and the system is triggered to sound the alarm. As a second line of defense, a motion sensor will detect movement of anything human size within its line of sight. Your pets can roam the house at will. But anyone creeping around will get caught by the infrared sensor. By the time they find out they've been discovered, it's too late.

The digital keypad is how you control the system. You enable it when you leave or want to be protected while you are at home, say overnight. Control is made easier with a key chain remote access that lets you arm or disarm the system with the push of a button. It looks just like the remote door opener for your car.

More options include carbon monoxide detectors, smoke and heat sensors, water sensors and freeze sensors so that you can rest assure that someone is keeping an eye on your property as well as your possessions.

What make the wireless home security system so effective is the monitoring service that goes with it. For a small monthly fee, you'll have a professional security center on duty 24 hours a day. Your system contacts the center over your regular telephone line. Don't have landline service? An upgrade includes a digital cellular connection that communicates wirelessly.

Another upgrade you may be interested in is two-way voice service. With this, your control panel acts as an intercom so you can talk to the monitoring center dispatcher even if you are injured and can't get to the panel. It's so effective that it will pick up your voice up to 75 feet away.

So how much does it cost to get one of these systems? The basic wireless security system is free, with a small fee for professional installation. Monitoring fees are modest and readily affordable. You choose the level of service you feel will be the most effective for your situation.

A Toll Free Number For Your Family

You call toll free numbers all the time for business, but have you ever considered having one for your family?

Here's why this makes sense. Toll free service has gotten so cheap that anyone can get one for themselves. What toll free numbers are good for is getting people to call you who might not otherwise because of the cost.

Who's that? Students away from home are a prime example, and if you've got one or more in college you know it's like pulling teeth to get them to talk to the folks at home. Phone service on campus has traditionally been expensive to the point of outrageous. You may have a phone in your room but you don't dare to use it for long distance calls for fear of the huge bill that will come your way.

Retired parents on fixed incomes are also wary of picking up the phone for a nice long chat over the miles. The cost of long distance service, even though you can get much cheaper long distance rates now, is still a barrier for people to make anything other than local calls.

Is one spouse traveling and the other at home? Might be nice to have a long talk from that hotel room. But hotel long distance rates are killers and you may not have a cheap billable calling card. Even on a cellphone, you might not want to burn an hour's worth of cellular minutes every evening. If you're in roaming territory you certainly don't want to.

Well, you can take the worry out of all these situations with a toll free number of your own. You only give it out to people you want to call you at your expense. Callers don't pay long distance rates to call toll free. Any calls you receive on that number only cost you 6.9 cents a minute. That's certainly less than hotel rates and may be less expensive than you pay now for regular long distance calls.

But how expensive are these numbers to get? How's $2 sound? Yes, an 866, 877 or 888 toll free number will cost you just $2 to get and $2 per month to keep as long as you like. 800 numbers are a little more. The only other charge is the 6.9 cents per minute rate for incoming calls from the 48 contiguous states and a bit higher for Alaska and Hawaii.

What you want to order is Kall8 Toll Free Service. One of the nice features of Kall8 is that you can choose which phone number you want your toll free number to ring to. That can be your home phone, cell phone or even office phone. There's no chance you'll miss a call if you always have the toll free number set to ring to the phone you are going to be at. If you can't take the call, voice mail will record it for you. You can even have the voicemail messages emailed so you can listen to them on your computer. Any FAX messages you get at your toll free number can also be sent to you as email attachments.

I see the gears turning! Hey, why not learn more and get a toll free number for your family now?

AT&T Waives Cell Phone Activation Fee This Week

I just got the word that AT&T is waiving the activation fee for new wireless customers through Midnight on Sunday, March 22. If you've been pondering a new AT&T cell phone with service this year, here's your incentive to act now. Hey, that's $36 you get to keep in your pocket. Now considering that you can get many hot AT&T cell phones for free and others at deep discounts, this special offer is really a bonus on top of a bonus on top of a ... Well, you get the idea.

Note: This is an exclusive offer available only through Sunday, March 22, 2009. We've got a collection of 67 AT&T cell phones, including BlackBerry models for your perusal. Some will even give you cash back as well as waive the activation fee. It's like finding a hidden gold mine, isn't it?

There are all sorts of cell phone specials available every day. Before you poke your nose in a retail store and get roped into paying too much, see how much you can save online first.

Cheap Home Phone Service is Now VoIP

Where do you find the cheapest home phone services? The low cost provider for many consumers is now a competitive VoIP provider. But do you know were to find the best deals on VoIP service? They're not necessarily the ones you see on TV.

VoIP is something fairly new in the telephone business. It stands for Voice over Internet Protocol. That's a hint as to how it works. The Internet Protocol is what computers use to upload and download data on the Internet. The "voice over" part indicates that instead of sending email or Web pages, we are using the Internet to send voice over its broadband connections.

So why VoIP? Traditional telephone service is delivered on copper wires to your home. It's a switched analog technology that has been used since the days of Alexander Graham Bell, with some technology updates along the way. But pretty much any phone you've ever had will still work on those analog lines. The standards have remained the same over the years.

The other thing that hasn't changed is that the local telephone company owns those wires that come to your house. Since deregulation of the telephone system some twenty or so years ago they no longer have exclusive rights to those lines. But the prices charged to competing companies to lease those lines is so high that few competitors can offer you a better deal and still make a profit. A few years ago they could, but changes in the regulations have driven most of them out of the marketplace.

This is where VoIP comes in. Competing phone companies have figured out that the way around leasing telephone wires is to avoid them. Instead, they use your DSL or Cable broadband service as the connection between your phone and their switching system. Since you already pay for your broadband service so that your computer can connect to the Internet, it's not very expensive to add telephone service to the same connection.

There are many providers of VoIP services now, but how do you find the best deals? Well it turns out there is a new online search engine that specializes in just VoIP phone services. It's called Affordable VoIP. All you need to do is decide on whether you want residential or business service, any other options to narrow the search results, and run the search. In seconds you'll get a list of the available VoIP plans organized by price with the cheapest deal at the top of the page.

One option you should definitely check is the box for "Adaptor/Router Included." The adaptor box is what connects your regular telephone that you already have to your Internet modem or router. Many of these adaptors have built-in provisions to share you computer and phone on the same line. A router, if you have one, will also do this sharing. But you need the adaptor box so that you don't have to turn on your computer to use your phone.

Ready to give it a try? It's fast and free to use anytime day or night. Visit Affordable VoIP and search for VoIP phone service now.