Business owners can save a lot of money if they are willing to look at their monthly phone and internet bills, and do a little online comparison shopping. Some businesses overspend on telephone service when they don’t need to, and if their telephone service and internet service are paid automatically via debit, credit card or automatic check withdrawal, they may never even look at their bills. There is a reason that internet and phone companies want you to pay via automatic debit, credit or ACH, and that is because as long as you don’t see the bill, you don’t know what you’re spending. And that’s one of those, out of sight, out of mind, situations that can get a business in to trouble.
The first bill that you need to look at is your local telephone service provider’s bill. How many lines do you have coming into the office, and do you need them all? Once you’ve counted all the local lines coming into your office, look at the phone bill and check which features each line has, and then decide if all the extra phone features are worth what you are being charged for them. Business telephone lines, with local telephone service only, can cost up to $40 per line each month with some telephone carriers, and if you’ve got very many local phone lines, they can really add up.
Once you’ve figured out the local phone provider’s bill, look at your long distance bill and see if your long distance company is giving you a good deal on long distance service, or whether they are an expensive long distance company . Also, check the long distance bill to see if there are any calls outside the US or Canada. Different long distance carriers charge different fees for domestic and international calls, so a $1.99 per minute call to Afghanistan with AT&T may only cost $0.42 per minute with a cheap company like Pioneer Telephone or PNG.
Now that you know what you are paying 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 of the United States, 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, if I’ve got your attention, let’s take a look at internet phone service and see if maybe we can reduce that bill a bit.
Broadband 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.)
Broadband telephone plans are cheap, costing between $19.99 and $79.99 per month, depending on what plan you get. Two of the digital phone companies offering cheap VoIP calling plans are Lingo and Phonepower. Lingo has unlimited calling to the United States, Canada, and 45 other countries for $21.95 per month, while Phonepower has unlimited calling on 2 lines in the United States and Canada for $19.95 per month. Both VoIP calling plans come with a ton of free features like 3-way calling, voice mail and others, that would cost a lot extra from a landline telephone provider. And one of the best things is that the taxes a fees are only about $3.00 per line each month.
If we check the price differences between landline telephone service and VoIP telephone service, VoIP telephone service wins in most cases. You can get 3-4 VoIP telephone lines from Phonepower for around $45 per month, including tax. Add to that the $60 for high speed internet service, and the whole 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, VoIP 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 home phone service, VoIP telephone service, and cellular telephone rate calculators to compare cheap business 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?
It’s as easy and sending an instant message.
It’s as easy and sending an instant message.