NEW YORK — The cost of making phone calls has been dropping rapidly in the last few years. If you want take full advantage of that, you'll need to try some new things, because the phone companies aren't going to thrust savings on you. Here are 10 tips on how to cut the cost of your phone service.

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Several services let you use your home broadband line to make and receive calls. Some of them are aimed at replacing your landline outright, while others are designed as complements.

_ Vonage is the most widely advertised replacement for the home phone line, and the price is more attractive than before. It just squeezed free calls to more than 60 countries into its standard $25-per-month plan, which already included free domestic calling.

Vonage sends you an adapter that connects to your broadband line and your old phone. The setup requires that you know where your broadband modem is and how to connect something to it. Vonage gives you a new phone number, or allows you to move over your old number to the service.

But if you're not a big overseas caller, there are cheaper alternatives, and in my testing, long-running problems with audio quality and reliability persist, particularly for international calls.

_ Ooma sells a device that's similar to Vonage's adapter, but once you've plunked down $250 for it, domestic calls are free. International calls are billed at low per-minute rates. Ooma's audio quality and reliability are much better than Vonage's, but slightly below that of a regular phone line. Like Vonage, Ooma will let you use your old phone number (for a $40 transfer fee). The adapter works as an answering machine too, and you can access your voice mail through a Web browser as well.

There's a new model of the Ooma device coming soon that can act as the base station for cordless phones. The price hasn't been announced. The company has hinted that buyers of the new model may need to pay low yearly fees to cover telecom taxes.

Source: The Associated Press