Business owners can save quite a bit of money if they are willing to check their monthly internet and telephone 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 via debit, credit card or automatic check withdrawal, they may never even look at their bills. There’s 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’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 telephone service provider’s 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 telephone bill and check which features each line has, and then decide if they are are worth what you’re paying for them. Business telephone lines, with local telephone service only, can cost up to $55 each month with some telecom carriers, and if you’ve got lots of local business lines, they can really cost you a lot of money.

Once you’ve figured out the local phone service 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 providers charge different fees for domestic and international calls, so a $1.95 per minute call to Afghanistan with PacBell may only cost $0.42 a minute with a low cost company like TCI or Opex.

Now that you can see what you are paying 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 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 broadband phone service providers and see about lowering your business’s telecom costs.

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 telephone plans themselves are cheap, costing between $19.99 and $79.99 a month, depending on which carrier you sign up with. Two of the broadband phone companies offering cheap VoIP 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 VoIP calling plans come with lots of free features like conference calling, call waiting and others, that would cost you extra from a landline telephone company. And one of the best things is that the taxes a fees are only about $3.00 per line each month.

If you check the price differences between landline telephone service and VoIP telephone service, VoIP telephone service wins in most cases. You can get 3-4 VoIP 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, VoIP telephone 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 telephone service, and cell telephone rate calculators to compare cheap home 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?