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. Many businesses overspend on phone service when they don’t need to, and if their phone 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 phone and internet 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 need to look at is your local phone 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 them, look at the phone bill and see which features each phone line has, and then decide if all the extra phone features are worth what you are paying for them. Business phone lines, with local service only, can cost up to $50 for each local phone line each month with some phone companies, and if you’ve got very many of them, they can really add up.

Once you’ve figured out the local telephone 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 providers charge different rates for domestic and international calls, so a $1.98 per minute call to Afghanistan with PacBell may only cost $0.42 a minute with a discount company like TCI or PNG.

Now that you see what you are being charged for the local landlines and for the long distance calls, look at the rest of the taxes and fees on the 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 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, 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.

Voice Over IP phone service needs 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, 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.)

Voice Over IP phone plans themselves are cheap, coming in at between $19.95 and $79.95 a month, depending on who you go with. Two of the VoIP phone service providers 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 lots of free features like 3-way calling, voice mail and others, that would cost a lot extra from a landline phone company. And best of all, the taxes and fees on one of these plans is only around $3.00 per month.

If you 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 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, VoIP phone service, and wireless phone 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?

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 6th, 2010 at 5:22 pm and is filed under voip service provider. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.