Posted By on August 28, 2010
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. Many businesses spend too much on phone service when they don’t need to, and if their telephone service and internet service are paid automatically via debit card, credit card or automatic check withdrawal, they may never even look at their bills. There’s a reason that telecom type 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 spending like that can end up costing you your business.
The first bill that you need to look at is your local phone service provider’s bill. How many lines do you have coming into the office, and do you need them all? Once you’ve counted your local lines, look at the phone bill and check which features each phone line has, and then decide if they are are worth what you are being charged for them. Business phone lines, with local service only, can cost up to $50 each and every month with some phone companies, and if you’ve got a bunch of them, they can really start adding up.
Once you’ve broken down the local phone service bill, look at your long distance bill and see if your long distance provider is giving you 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 carriers charge different fees for domestic and international calls, so a $1.90 per minute call to Afghanistan with AT&T may only cost $0.42 a minute with a discount company like TCI or PNG.
Now that you can see what you are being charged for local and long distance phone service, look at the rest of the taxes and fees that are applied to your phone bill. 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.
Voice Over IP phone service needs a fast internet connection to work, so there is going to be an additional charge for 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.)
Voice Over IP phone calling plans themselves are cheap, costing between $19.99 and $79.99 a month, depending on which carrier you sign up with. Two of the VoIP phone companies offering cheap VoIP 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 VoIP calling plans come with a ton of free features like conference calling, voice mail and others, that would cost a lot extra from a landline phone carrier. and what’s really neat is that the taxes and fees on VoIP lines are less expensive than the PIC-C fees landline companies charge per business line.
If we do the math between landline phone service and VoIP phone service, VoIP phone service wins in most cases. You can get 3-4 VoIP phone 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 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 home phone service, VoIP phone service, and cell phone rate calculators to compare cheap phone service. I know that my small business can’t afford to give away $1500 or more per year to the phone companies; Can Yours?
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Tags: business phone service, cheap phone service, internet phone service, phone, VoIP
