Expensive phone bills? Cut Them Down To Size!

By: Paul McIndoe
Submitted: 2008-11-04 17:59:59
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Not so long ago, using the telephone was an expensive business. With telecommunications companies charging high rates, particularly for European or international calls, people often found themselves with exorbitant phone bills come the end of the month.

However, with the rise in companies offering different phone services and competitively priced monthly packages, as well as the increasing use of mobile phones and computer technology, it is now possible to avoid receiving huge bills for phone calls.

Indeed, if you’re intelligent about your approach to using the phone, you can all but render those high call charges obsolete, and leave those phone bills looking less like telephone numbers themselves and more like the monetary figures you would expect to pay out.

This is especially true for European or international phone calls. In the not so distant past, it was a common occurrence for people to receive unexpectedly huge bills after calling relatives that had emigrated overseas, or for speaking to foreign friends they had met. Often, people felt it would have just been cheaper to buy a plane ticket to visit said relatives or friends, rather than calling them!

Thankfully, there are now a number of new ways in which to contact people via the telephone which don’t cost an entire month’s wages. Take the companies who have devised cheap access codes for dialling into different countries, as a prime example.

Many of these companies operate over the internet, and by doing a quick search, you can find dialling codes for most European and international countries, thus enabling cheap telephone calls.

To find the desired code, you simply enter the country you wish to call, for example, Poland. You should be directed to a list of numbers corresponding to the different cities in Poland, i.e. Gdansk, Warsaw or Krakow. Then, when you have located the number you want, you type this into your phone’s keypad – mobile or landline – along with the country’s dialling code and the phone number of the person you want to reach.

Usually, all phone bills you receive will still come from your service provider and not from the company providing the cheap access call codes. Therefore, if you make a ten minute call to Poland from a UK landline, and the cheap code you dialled enables you to speak to your Polish friend for 2 pence a minute, you will be billed for the connection fee your service provider charges plus 20 pence from the access code.

Consequently, you only end up paying for the initial connection charge of your provider and not their ‘per minute’ rates, which are more often than not, much higher than when using the access codes. The upshot means, you can make cheap calls to Poland, or wherever else you wish, without having to worry about how long you are chatting on the phone for!

Article source: Expert Articles