Ting Home Connect – Savings for Landline Fans

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If you want to save money on your home phone line but aren’t quite ready to give up on the convenience of having a landline, check out Ting Home Connect. Ting, the cell phone service provider, has launched a service called Home Connect that gives you home phone service that may save you money on your phone bill. In fact, Ting is guaranteeing that you will save money on your home phone bill with their Home Phone Challenge.

You may recall Ting from Ten Reasons Why Ting May Be Your Next Cell Phone Provider. The company has a radically different way of providing cell phone service – paying for what you actually use and giving you credit if you don’t use up your monthly allotment of voice minutes, text message or data. Home Connect brings that concept to your home phone.

I recently spoke with Andrew Moore-Crispin, Content Manager of Ting, who explained how Home Connect works. “With having a landline phone, you’re spending $30, maybe $40 a month, whether you use the phone once or twice or you use it dozens of times. Ting wants to give you other other options.”

How Home Connect Works

With Home Connect you get a box, called Home Connect2, and plug it into your high speed Internet router. Then connect your home phone to the Home Connect2 box. Home Connect uses cell phone service for your home phone. Call Ting Customer Service to walk you through the set up.

“You don’t lose your phone sitting on the kitchen counter or wherever it might be, but you’re actually making the calls over the cellular network instead. The way you use your phone doesn’t change, what changes is how you’re billed for the phone service,” said Moore-Crispin.

Pay for What You Use

With Ting Home Connect, you pay for the voice minutes you use. Like Ting cell phone service, with Home Connect you sign up for buckets of minutes, from XS – 0 minutes for $0, to M – 500 minutes for $9 to L – $18 for 1000 minutes, and higher. Here’s a chart showing the price of different buckets.

You pay for the bucket you use each month. For example, if you sign up for the Medium bucket, 500 minutes for $9, but use fewer than 100 minutes in a month, you would receive a $6 credit towards your bill the next month.

In addition to the bucket of minutes you buy, you pay $6 per month for the Home Phone service plus any taxes and regulatory fees. So if you used Home Connect to chat for 95 minutes in a month, you would pay a total of $9, $6 for the Home Connect Phone and $3 for the bucket of 100 minutes, plus government fees and taxes.

Home + Cell Savings

If you use Ting as your cell phone service provider, you can share your bucket of minutes with your Ting cell phone service, you only need to pay for one bucket of minutes each month. For example, if you talk on your cell phone for 40 minutes and on your home phone for 50 minutes during a month you would fit into the Small bucket, your total cost for those landline and cell phone minutes combined would be $3.

Here’s a video showing how Ting’s rates work. Note that the video is for Ting’s cell phone service but those rates apply to Home Connect as well.

If you’re not a Ting customer, you can still use Home Connect.

Keep Your Home Number

With Home Connect you can keep your home phone number. Ting will transfer your number to their Home Connect service so you can get Ting’s landline rates without having to change your home phone number.

Customer Service

The best part about Ting for many people is its customer service. Ting has a No Hold policy where real people answer the phone. You never talk to a machine, operators answer the phone and are trained to answer your questions.

Go ahead. Call them. 1 855 846 4389.

How cool is it to talk to a real person without having to navigate through a chain of automated prompts? Very cool.

[warning] Warning: Ting’s stellar customer service will spoil you for all other customer service experiences. [/warning]

“Customer Service is one of the fundamental ideals that Ting is built on,” said Moore-Crispin. “I don’t think it should be a surprise. If you call someone that you do business with and give them money every month, they should be there to pick up the phone. It’s a super simple idea but it’s amazing how rarely it is put into practice.”

Ting Home Phone Challenge

Interested in giving Home Connect a try? Ting is having a Home Phone Challenge until July 31. During the Home Phone Challenge, you can get $25 off of the cost of the Home Connect2 box by clicking on this link: Ting Home Phone Challenge, plus Ting will guarantee that you save money off of the cost of your home phone bill by using Home Connect. If you don’t save money, Ting will fully refund the cost of your Home Connect2 box. “We’re giving people $25 off the device so that they can try it and if they don’t find that compared to their copper wire landline telephone they money, we’ll refund the purchase in full,” explained Moore-Crispin.

The Home Connect2 box costs $99, but by using the link above, you pay only $74.

What Else You Should Know

Ting uses the Sprint Network for its service. Before signing up with Ting, be sure that you have Sprint coverage in your area. Check the Sprint Network coverage map to see if Ting service is available where you live.

You can find out more details about Home Connect and the Home Phone Challenge from the Ting website.

Your Thoughts

Have you been considering giving up on your landline to save money? Would you like to keep your home phone number to save money? Have you called Ting’s customer service and talked to a real human being? Let us know in the Comments section below!

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Carolyn is on vacation, traveling the globe in search of more fun and useful tech. Articles will continue to be published at The Wonder of Tech while she is away.