Believe it or not, I'm not stupid. My wife wants to do call center stuff, and they require a land line or cable. AT&T wanted something crazy for a basic landline, so the $10/mo add-on with TWC was the best option. They also require minimum 15 down.
Never stated that you're stupid, but you
are dangerously underinformed.
From my standpoint, it looks like WOW was actually trying to do you a kindness by offering you a service package that actually fit the needs of your wife by virtue of needing to go with a business line if she's doing call center work, only she did the same thing you are - getting offended instead of listening. WOW's residential phone service has an undisclosed volume abuse termination clause that their business phone service does not. Odds are, AT&T was doing business line call volume pricing as well.
Now, VOIPo does small business lines for the same price as residential, and VOIPo's hard cap is 5,000 minutes a month. The only technical difference between TWC and VOIPo is literally a UPS battery that you attach to the modem/router/ATA for uptime versus being built-in from the ISP as they're both VoIP. Heck, even AT&T's service is VoIP now from at least the CLEC. If you're in Uverse territory, it's VoIP from your home's router. When it's set up right, they wouldn't even know the difference. If anything, unless you're paying
big bucks for business service from TWC for your wife's call center stuff, your residential phone line is hard capped to
only 1,000 minutes a month (sixteen hours and 40 minutes) -
one-fifth of the call time for considerably more money and hassle. And you know how I know you're not paying for their business service? Because you got the residential discount of 50Mbps internet for $40/month plus $10/month for a phone line.
Odds are, your wife's employer has that requirement because they need you to have business call center minutes available. If 5,000 minutes a month aren't enough through most flat-rate VoIP providers, you're going to have to drop some real coin to keep your phone service (and likely internet service given the speed requirements and data loads likely needed) from being terminated.
Now, you can either continue to be offended, or you can actually listen to a voice of far greater experience trying to help keep you out of trouble. Your choice, friend.
Now to attack our Cell phone bill...
Good thing
there's an entire guide (
more current and complete) for that. :)