Business owners can save a lot of money if they are willing to go over their monthly internet and telephone bills, and do a little online comparison shopping. Many businesses spend too much on telephone 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 is a reason that telecom 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 bill. Count all the local lines you are paying for, and then decide if you really need them all. Once you’ve counted your local lines, look at the phone bill and check which features each telephone 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 $55 for each local phone line each month with some phone companies, 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 deciphered the local telephone service bill, look at your long distance bill and see if your long distance company is providing you with 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 companies charge different fees for domestic and international calls, so a $1.95 per minute call to Afghanistan with AT&T may only cost $0.51 a minute with a cheap company like Total Call International or Opex Communications.
Now that you see what you are paying for the local landlines and for the long distance calls, 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 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.
VoIP phone service requires 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 it from your local cable company for around $60 per month for 4 to 12 MB of service. 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 are cheap, costing between $19.95 and $79.95 a month, depending on what plan you get. Two of the VoIP phone service providers offering cheap VoIP calling plans are Lingo and Phonepower. Lingo offers unlimited calling to the US, Canada, and 45 other countries for $21.95 per month, while Phonepower offers unlimited calling on 2 lines in the US and Canada for $19.95 per month. Both VoIP calling plans come with lots of free features like conference calling, voice mail and others, that would cost you extra from a landline telephone provider. and what’s really neat is that the taxes and fees on VoIP lines are less expensive than the PIC-C fees landline carriers charge per business line.
If you do the math 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 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, VoIP telephone 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 landline, VoIP telephone service, and wireless telephone rate calculators to compare cheap local 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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business phone service, cheap phone service, internet phone service, phone, VoIP