Save 60% Or More With Voice Over IP Telephone Service
Aug 25, 2010 in Technology and Gadgets
Business owners can save quite a bit of money if they are willing to go over their monthly phone and internet bills, and do a little online comparison shopping. Some businesses spend too much on telephone service when they don’t need to, and if their telephone service and internet service are paid automatically by debit card, credit card or automatic check withdrawal, they may never even look at their bills. There is a reason that telecom type companies want you to pay via automatic debit, credit or ACH, and that’s because as long as you don’t see the bill, you don’t know what you’re spending. And that can end up getting a business into trouble.
The first bill that you need to look at is your local phone service provider’s bill. Do you use all of the lines coming into your office, and if so, how much are they costing you each month? Once you’ve counted all the local lines coming into your office, look at the phone bill and see which features each phone line has, and then decide if they are are worth what you’re paying for them. Business telephone lines, with local phone service only, can cost up to $50 per line each month with some carriers, and if you’ve got very many of them, they can really start adding up.
Once you’ve deciphered the local telephone provider’s bill, look at your long distance bill and see if your long distance provider is providing you with a good deal on long distance service, or whether they are an expensive long distance provider . Also, check the long distance bill to see if there are any calls outside the US or Canada. Different long distance providers charge different rates for domestic and international calls, so a $1.98 per minute call to Afghanistan with SBC may only cost $0.53 per minute with a low cost company like Total Call International or Opex.
Now that you can see what you are being charged for your phone service and the calls, look at the rest of the taxes and fees that are applied to your phone bill. In most areas of the US, the taxes and fees on landline phone service are %25 to %30 of the total bill. So, if your telephone bill was $100 for 2 or 3 local business lines, and $50 for domestic and international long distance calls, there might be an additional $40 to $50 in taxes and fees, for a total bill of around $200. Now let’s check out some internet phone service providers and see about lowering your business’s telecom costs.
VoIP phone service requires high speed internet service, so there is going to be the added charge of having high speed internet service coming into your office. If you don’t have high speed internet service, you can get 8 to 16 MB of internet service for around $60 per month or less. That much bandwidth can run a lot of phones and a lot of computer apps, especially when you consider a T1 line has 23 channels, and that’s only 1.5MB of bandwidth. In my office, I run 2 internet phones and 3 computers, plus pipe in Pandora for office music, all with an 8MB plan from Charter. (It’s in my house, so I only pay $29.95 per month.)
VoIP telephone plans themselves are cheap, coming in at between $19.99 and $79.99 per month, depending on what plan you get. Two of the broadband phone service providers offering cheap internet calling plans are Lingo and Phonepower. Lingo has unlimited calling to the US, Canada, and 45 other countries for $21.95 per month, while Phonepower has unlimited calling on 2 lines in the US and Canada for $19.95 per month. Both internet calling plans come with lots of free features like 3-way calling, fax catcher and others, that would cost you extra from a landline telephone provider. and what’s really cool is that the taxes and fees on VoIP lines are cheaper than the PICC fees landline companies charge per business line.
If we check the price differences between landline telephone service and internet telephone service, internet telephone service wins in most cases. You can get 3-4 internet telephone lines from Phonepower for around $45 per month, including tax. Add to that the $60 for high speed internet service, and the total bill comes to around $105 instead of the $200 that landline service would cost you. And, if you figure in the fact that most businesses already have high speed internet service, the savings increase to around $155, instead of $95, per month. Any way that you look at it, internet telephone service in this case is going to save you $1100 to $1900 per year over what you would pay for 2 or 3 landlines plus long distance service, plus taxes and fees.
For more information on saving your business money, visit calling-plans.com and use their land-line, internet telephone service, and wireless telephone rate calculators to compare cheap home phone service. I know that my small business can’t afford to give away $1500+ per year to the telephone companies; Can Yours?
