Lingo has been good for us, too. International calls are the only reason we have a landline - 3c per minute calls to Australia (most of our family), and calls to land lines in Western Europe are free (my sister is in London... very handy). Canada and all of the USA included too. Even with a few long calls each month to Oz, our monthly bill is under $30.

We have Comcast cable, but have only had 2 serious outages in 3 years. One was our modem dying, the other was just after they completely fugged up their major server upgrade. We both have cell phones, mine supplied by work with pretty much unlimited minutes, so hanging out on the cell talking to comcast is no biggie. We've had Lingo for over a year, and never had a problem with it.

The VOIP companies have all had to become 911 compliant lately. As I understood it, a major part of why they weren't previously wasn't because they didn't want to be, but because the local phone companies wouldn't give them access to that part of the service. Not all that sure on the details...