Telephone

If you're looking for alternatives to your traditional copper pair POTS (plain old telephone system), you might want to check out VoIP (voice over IP), specifically SIP providers. There are many out there that will give you a North American DID for only a few dollars a month. This means if most of your calls are from Vancouver, BC you might want a 604 DID (number). Now your friends can call what appears to be a local number to them, but it in fact dials over the internet to your softphone, or hardware SIP phone. Long distance rates are very cheap with SIP. The one challenge with SIP is latency. You can taste latency with traceroute. If you consistently get under 120ms you should be OK for SIP!