You can debate the pros and cons of dispensing with your land line until the cows come home, but there's one service online that makes whatever kind of phone lines you keep irrelevant. That's Google Voice, a service from the search and "cloud computing" giant that gives you one number to rule them all.
I've written before about Google Voice, and Charlie White did an excellent tutorial on it. To recap, Google Voice can:
There's one recently added feature that makes it worth taking a look at again: you can now transfer one of your existing phone numbers to the service for $20, and make it your number for everything. Previously, your only option was to select a number provided by Google for free.
There are some hiccups to the process, as it's documented in this video from Google (below). The first of them is that it apparently only works with mobile phone numbers, so you'll have to disconnect your existing phone service on your mobile and get assigned a new number:
Of course, Google Voice isn't the only way to do this. Skype offers similar capabilities through its Skype In and Skype Out services and through call forwarding, and you can even place Skype calls from your smart phone or an iPod Touch. Skype will forward calls to multiple numbers at the same time as well.
But you can't transfer your personal phone number to your Skype account. And for people who are tired of handing out new numbers that they soon forget themselves (like I am with my new home phone number), that might be enough to convince them to go with Google Voice instead.
Oh, and there's one other thing—you can make free phone calls from within GMail with Google Voice for all of 2011.