[ale] Recommendations for cheap phone service?

[mute wonder]

We have a MagicJack at home, and it's a real pain; I wouldn't
recommend it to most people.  Intending to use it as a replacement for
a land-line, it's never been reliable enough to justify dropping the
land-line phone.  Only runs on Windows (some customers have gotten it
working on Linux...some), and the computer it's attached to needs to
be on, AND logged in, for the MagicJack phone to ring.  While there
are nifty call forwarding and voicemail/email features, using a fax
machine over that phone line hasn't worked well (it's not officially
supported, but some customers have luck with this...some).  Sure, it's
cheap and portable, but heed the info in the official Q&A to see if it
might suffice.