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A while ago we decided to move our home phone to a VOIP (Voice over IP) phone. We reduced our monthly bill average from $105 per month to about $28 per month...
In the past we had a conventional home phone line. We had signed up for a "SPECIAL" from one of the major carriers which promised good rates, some free calls per month and reduced line rental. We were spending on average about $105 per month. Sep-04 $82.84
Oct-04 123.14
Nov-04 110.37
Dec-04 102.66
Jan-05 85.4
Feb-05 114.93
Mar-05 104.1
Apr-05 80.72
May-05 114.46
Jun-05 109.98
Jul-05 122.48
Aug-05 119.16 We were also spending on average about $85/month on a mobile phone bill. The bills varied from $50 to $150 depending on usage. We heard about the new VOIP (Voice Over IP) systems that were coming out. We had also used systems like Skype, Yahoo and AOL on our computers to speak to folk for free across the globe. The issue is that it's always a hassle to start up the computer ... especially when you're moving about the house with the kids and you really need a portable phone. The VOIP "box" allowed us to plug our normal portable phone into it, like any other conventional phone. The VOIP system also allowed us to have a conventional telephone number, so people could always call us the same as usual and we did not need our computer to be on all the time to receive a call. At the time the VOIP technology was new and we were definitely early adopters. We ran the two in parallel for while then evemtually got rid of our traditional landline all together. Recently I went back to analyse what our phone bill was looking like: Here's the result: Jun-06 $34.16
Jul-06 22.53
Aug-06 19.83
Sep-06 23.1
Oct-06 31.3
Nov-06 31.22
Dec-06 29.7
Jan-07 26.98
Feb-07 38.33
Mar-07 34.98
Apr-07 24.71
May-07 24.32 Wow!!!! Average monthly bill for the land-line is now about $28. That's a HUGE saving. How did we do it? By moving to VOIP we removed our line-rental and reduced the average call costs from about 20 cents to 10 cents. The international calling rates were brilliant too... about the same as one of those calling cards you purchase from the newsagent, without the hassle of having to dial in a whole bunch of numbers before each call. We also changed the mobile phone bill from a variable bill to a monthly fixed bill of about $80. This mobile fixed plan gave us $500 worth of mobile calls. We made an effort to use the mobile when calling other mobiles. So it's worth checking out some of the online VOIP vendors and what they can do with you. Assumptions 1) You have a broadband internet connection. Note, we have always had this so we did not add it into the costs. 2) We have mobile phones so if the internet connection did go down, which has been rare we could make emergency calls. BTW, we used Engin as our VOIP provider. |
