Business owners can save quite a bit of money if they are willing to go over their monthly local, long distance and internet bills, and do a little online comparison shopping. Some businesses spend too much on phone service when they don’t need to, and if their telephone service and internet service are paid automatically by debit, credit card or automatic check withdrawal, they may never even look at their bills. There’s a reason that internet and phone 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 spending like that can end up costing you your business.
The first bill that you should look at is your local telephone provider’s bill. Count all the local lines you are paying for, and then decide if you really need them all. Once you’ve counted all the local lines coming into your office, look at the bill and check which features each telephone line has, and then decide if the features are worth what you’re being charged for them. Business phone lines, with local phone service only, can cost up to $45 each and every month with some providers, and if you’ve got very many local phone lines, they can really cost you way more than you really need to spend for business phones service.
Once you’ve figured out the local telephone provider’s bill, look at your long distance bill and see if your long distance carrier is offering you a good deal on long distance service, or whether they are an expensive long distance carrier . 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 $0.42 a minute with a discount company like Total Call International or Powernet Global.
Now that you can see what you are paying for local and long distance phone service, look at the rest of the taxes and fees you are paying for your local and long distance calls. In most US cities and towns, the taxes and fees on landline phone service are %25 to %30 of the total bill. So, if your phone 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 digital phone service providers and see about lowering your business’s telecom costs.
Internet phone service needs high speed internet service, so there is going to be an additional charge for having high speed internet service coming into your office. If you don’t, high speed internet service in the 8 to 16MB range can be had for between $30 and $90 per month, with the average being somewhere around $60 per month.. 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.)
Internet phone plans themselves are cheap, costing between $19.95 and $79.95 a 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 phone carrier. And best of all, the taxes and fees on one of these plans is only around $3.00 per month.
If we do the math between landline phone service and internet phone service, internet phone service wins in most cases. You can get 3-4 internet phone 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 phone service in this case is going to save your business $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 local phone service, internet phone service, and cellular phone rate calculators to compare cheap long distance phone service. I know that my small business can’t afford to give away $1500 or more per year to the telephone companies; Can Yours?