Save 40% Or More With Internet Telephone Service

Business owners can save quite a bit of money if they are willing to look at their monthly local, long distance 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 phone and internet service are paid automatically by debit, credit card or automatic check withdrawal, they may never even look at their bills. There is a reason that telephone and internet 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 can end up getting a business into trouble.

The first bill that you need to look at is your local telephone service 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 telephone bill and see which features each phone line has, and then decide if they're are worth what you're paying for them. Business telephone lines, with local service only, can cost up to $55 each and every month with some telecom carriers, and if you've got lots of local business 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 phone provider's bill, look at your long distance bill and see if your long distance company 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 carriers charge different rates for domestic and international calls, so a $1.90 per minute call to Afghanistan with PacBell may only cost $0.43 a minute with a discount company like Pioneer Telephone or Opex Communications.

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 on the 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 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 VoIP phone service providers and see about lowering your business's telecom costs.

Internet phone service requires a fast internet connection to work, so there is going to be the added charge of having high speed internet service coming into your office. If you don't, a basic plan with 6-12MB of service can run $40 to $100, but will usually be in the $60 range. 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 are cheap, costing between $19.95 and $79.99 a month, depending on who you go with. Two of the broadband phone companies offering cheap internet calling plans are Lingo and Phonepower. Lingo offers 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 US and Canada for $19.95 per month. Both internet calling plans come with a ton of free features like Caller ID, call waiting 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 do the math between landline telephone service and internet telephone service, broadband telephone service wins in most cases. You can get 3-4 internet 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, internet 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 local phone service, broadband 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 telecom companies; Can Yours?