Save Your Business Money With Internet Telephone Service

Aug.28, 2010 in Technology and Gadgets

Business owners can save a lot of money if they are willing to check their monthly internet and telephone bills, and do a little online comparison shopping. Some businesses spend too much 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’s 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 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 should 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 all the local lines coming into your office, look at the telephone bill and see which features each telephone line has, and then decide if they are are worth what you are paying for them. Business phone lines, with local phone service only, can cost up to $40 for each local phone line per month with some phone companies, and if you’ve got lots of local business lines, they can really start adding up.

Once you’ve broken down the local phone service provider’s bill, look at your long distance bill and see if your long distance carrier 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 companies charge different rates for domestic and international calls, so a $2.00 per minute call to Afghanistan with AT&T may only cost $0.51 per minute with a discount company like TCI or Opex Communications.

Now that you can see 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 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.

Broadband 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, 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 phone calling plans themselves are cheap, coming in at between $19.99 and $79.99 per month, depending on who you go with. Two of the digital phone service providers 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 offers unlimited calling on 2 lines in the United States and Canada for $19.95 per month. Both internet calling plans come with a ton of free features like conference calling, fax catcher and others, that would cost you 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 we check the price differences between landline phone service and internet phone service, internet phone service wins in most cases. You can get 3-4 internet 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, 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 land-line, internet phone service, and cell phone 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?