VoIP Phone Service Can Save Your Business A Ton

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. Some businesses overspend on phone service when they don't need to, and if their phone and internet service are paid automatically via debit card, credit card or automatic check withdrawal, they may never even look at their bills. There's a reason that internet and phone 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 service bill. How many lines do you have coming into the office, and do you need them all? Once you've counted your local lines, look at the phone bill and see which features each line has, and then decide if the features are worth what you are being charged for them. Business phone lines, with local service only, can cost up to $55 per line per month with some telecom providers, and if you've got lots of local business lines, they can really start adding up.

Once you've figured out the local phone service bill, look at your long distance bill and see if your long distance provider is giving 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 SBC may only cost $0.42 per minute with a cheap company like Total Call International or PNG.

Now that you know what you are being charged for your phone service and the calls, look at the rest of the taxes and fees you are paying for your local and long distance calls. 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 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 let's check out some VoIP phone service providers and see about lowering your business's telecom costs.

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 phone calling plans are cheap, coming in at between $19.99 and $79.95 a month, depending on which carrier you sign up with. Two of the VoIP phone service providers offering cheap internet 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 a ton of free features like conference calling, fax catcher and others, that would cost you extra from a landline telephone carrier. 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 telephone service and internet phone service, internet 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, broadband 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, broadband telephone service, and cellular phone rate calculators to compare cheap phone service. I know that my small business can't afford to give away $1500 or more per year to the telephone companies; Can Yours?

Greg Anliker is a telecom agent, and writes for http://www.calling-plans.com.

Calling-Plans.com reviews, compares and has links for phone companies, so that consumers can sign up for the best plans for their calling paterns and locations. Visit Calling-Plans.com to compare rates for conference calling plans, toll free phone service, long distance service and companies offering residential telecom services and business phone services.