Dime Line! Friends and Family! One Rate! GTE, Pac-Bell, Sprint, ATT, MCI, ITS, TCG, .... and so on. How is a person supposed to know who will give them the best rates? It’s not really that hard. Just forget all the marketing hype and remember a few rules and you will do fine. So what are these golden rules? Look for a service that: 1. Bills in six second intervals, not one minute intervals, 2. Has no minimum call length (one company out there charges a minimum of three minutes on every call), 3.Charges the same rate regardless of time or day of the week, 4.Gives you a free calling card that is charged at the same rates as the signed-up phone, 5. has no surcharges for using the calling cards ( companies like GTE, MCI, Pac-Bell charge as much as a .50 cent surcharge, other companies have no surcharges).
And remember, the industry standard cost for providing long distance is 6 cents per minute. So the closer your rates are to that 6 cents the better the deal.
In addition to long distance charges, the killer on most phone bills is what’s called LATA or INTAR LATA calls. A LATA or INTRA LATA call is a call that is over 13 miles from you, but is still inside your LATA area. The greater Los Angeles area is the worlds largest LATA area -- "LATA area 5". It’s bigger then some states. It reaches past San Bernardino all they way into San Diego. That’s why it can cost more to call Long Beach then New York. So shop for a good LATA rate along with your Long Distance rates.
To find out what LATA area your in contact your local telephone company.
Look at you phone bill. Study it. What are your calling patterns? Are the majority of your calls Long Distance or LATA? This will tell you where you can save the most money.
After being given rates by a company (get them in writing), look over the fine print. Is it six second billing, is there a minimum charge per month, are you signing up month to month, or for a year or more?
The last thing to do is shop the rates. Will anyone put a better deal in writing? If so is there a long term commitment?
To help you judge what’s a good rate, a small company making about $100 to $200 per month in calls should be able to obtain the following rates (based in Los Angeles). The rates per minute should be billed at six seconds, are LATA and INTRA LATA $0.064, Long Distance in-state $0.079, Long Distance out-of-state $0.0104. The carriers should provide calling card(s) billed at the same rate, with no surcharge. It isn't hard to find a good company that can meet or better the above rates, depending on your calling patterns.
Now go out there and save some money on your phone bill.
Does it seem like area codes in California are changing faster then you can get new stationary printed? Then you need to surf on over to the home of the North American Numbering Plan (this is the site to find out about area code changes for all of North America) http://www.bellcore.com/NANP/
Do you wish you had a personal assistant available 24 hours a day to track you down and deliver important massages to you? Take messages and deliver them to clients? Connect you to clients? Give you reminders of appointments? In the months to come, we will be looking at the world of Virtual Offices, and follow-me phone services. We will also be looking at low cost devises that let your office phone do all the work. Want a sneak peek at things to come? Then check out Wildfire by calling (800) WILDFIRE or visit them at www.wildfire.com/corporate/Corp.html. By the end of the year your desk top computer should be able to act just like Wildfire. For a look at things to come visit Voice Processing Corporation at www.vpro.com . Their Phone Wizard product promises great things. For a peek at the phone answering machine of the future (it's actually here now), point your web browser to www.dcint.com. This is the home page for a company called Datum. They manufacture an amazing Telephony product called Tina. Not only will "she" answer you calls, take messages, forward callers to your location, and let you make long distance calls from remote locations, "she" only costs about $200.00. But now I’m getting ahead of myself. So until next month don’t let your phones drive you crazy.