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Home Page > Money > Martin Lewis Money Saving Expert Advice > Phone Call Costs Set To Soar

Phone Call Costs Set To Soar

If you have a BT landline, the cost of a natter is set to soar. Having already hiked prices this year, it’s doing it AGAIN in October. And where BT leads others follow. Yet, if you’re prepared to ring in the changes now, you can beat it before it happens.

How it all adds up.

In combination, these price rises are substantial:

  • April’s cleverness. BT played a genius move in April, by shifting what counts as peak daytime hours from the old 6am to 6pm, to the new 7am to 7pm - That means, while it can argue it hasn’t increased peak hours, it’s effectively made calls cheaper during a quiet morning hour and chopped an hour off busy cheap evening call times – plus it hiked the cost of calling during peak hours at the same time.
This isn’t just about BT. Many of the other big providers such as TalkTalk and Sky soon followed suit with their own changes, meaning prices will soar in homes across the land. This is partly because some promise to be cheaper, so when BT hikes prices they can do the same.

  • Price hikes due in October

    It’s not just line rental going up, call connection cost rise 1p, so every single chargeable call that’s connected through will cost a penny more. Plus its daytime call costs rise yet again, to 6.4p a minute.
Slash line rental to £9 a month

Don’t sit back on your laurels and accept the hikes. It’s easy to beat them.

  • Want to stick with BT.

    To offset the price hikes, it’s launched a new Line Rental Saver deal where you pay £114 for a year’s line rental upfront, including ‘free’ weekend calls to landlines. This is the equivalent to £9.49 a month and a saving of £30 over its cheapest monthly line rental deal.

    If you’re already locked into a BT contract, don’t worry. It’ll allow you to break that contract if you are signing up for this one, but to be sure you get it, you must sign up before the new pricing structure starts.
  • Ditch BT and save even more
Sign up for the Primus Home Phone Saver tariff specifically via the homephonechoices.co.uk website, and for £8.99 a month you get line rental including free weekend and evening calls to landlines.

That’s more calls included and for a longer period and at a cheaper price than BT’s new deal. With BT, free means the first 60 minutes are free, with Primus it’s 90 minutes.

If you’re worried about the idea of someone physically disconnecting and reconnecting your line, don’t be. It works on a carrier pre-select system on your existing BT line; it’s only your calls and billing that are routed through Primus. Pretty much every phone company bar Virgin, which has its own lines, works this way.

If you also want broadband, don’t automatically jump for a ‘bundled’ package where it’s all wrapped in to one. The very cheapest way is simply to get one of the line rental deals above and then cheap broadband which starts at £6 a month (see www.moneysavingexpert.com/broadband for full best-buys).

Then use override providers to really slash the cost

Whether you’re on BT or Primus, to make much bigger savings on top you can then use no-frills ‘override’ providers.  

To access these, all you do is dial a number from your home phone and bingo you’ve ‘over-ridden’ its call costs and are now on the super-cheap providers’ rates instead.

The overall winner is a company called 18185.co.uk. To use it, first sign up on its website, then dial its free prefix access number (unsurprisingly, 18185) before you make any call. It bills you by direct debit for them.

Now get ready for this … while BT daytime costs 6.4p per MINUTE (from Oct) plus a connection fee, here you pay 5p per CALL no matter how long you speak.  So, while BT will be nearly £4 for an hour’s daytime call, 18185 is 5p. 

In addition, the cost of calling mobiles midweek can be roughly half the cost of using BT. If you’re trying to work out how this interacts with your line rental deal, it’s quite simple: use your line rental deal when calls are free and 18185 for everything else except weekend calls to 0870 numbers if you’re on BT.
 
Yet, while this works on BT and Primus, some line rental providers bar the prefix dial type override providers. For details of alternatives, see www.moneysavingexpert.com/homephones
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