Telecommunications...

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a while and have kept forgetting… or running out of time perhaps!

After deciding we were really sick of the amount of money we were spending on our telecommunications, for the not very good service we were receiving, we decided to look into our options… well read I had to look into our options LOL.

We used to have our home phone, internet, and mobile phone with Telstra and were spending around $200 per month on all of these products. We really felt it was obscene considering we aren’t the chatty, always on the phone, type of people, and our internet package was really not that great compared to some of the alternatives.

So I sat down one afternoon and started to work through all of our options. I went through the last 6 bills to get an average of each type of call we made, as well as our net usage etc. Then I spent hours trawling through all the other service providers and inputting their charges and plans and any other important information into a spreadsheet. Finally after around 6 hours I got to the fun stage – putting in our usage and getting the calculations for what our bills would be under the alternatives.

This was tricky of course because no two plans are identical! But, I changed formulas etc and fiddled around a bit to get it as accurate as possible… there really was an astounding difference! I was expecting a saving, but not as dramatic as it could be.

Finally after sleeping on it and rechecking my sums, we decided that what we needed was a VOIP plan, a very basic home phone line, and broadband internet with at least 3mb of download per month.

We quickly eliminated a few that were really not suitable and were left with a couple of clear leaders. So then I hit a few forums and sussed out what people were saying about their customer service – this was a big deal for me as I was resenting being on hold for hours just to be given the run around if I ever did need to query our account or make changes.

After all of this (and you are probably starting to get bored reading!), we have opted for the following packages:

VOIP – MyNetFone $10 per month Mega Saver Plan – 100 free local/std calls and then very reasonable rates.

Home Phone and Internet – Westnet – the phone (including caller id display) is just over $30 per month and the internet which runs WAY faster than our old plan is $40 per month.

These changes all took place through out April – VOIP at the beginning of the month, the home phone and net not until the end of the month.

Our first VOIP account was a whopping $14.55 for the entire month of April’s phone calls.

Our first Westnet account was $83 and that covered about a week of line rental/interent from April, and our entire May line rental and net charges, as well as the odd calls we did make using this service if we forgot to use the VOIP phone.

We will still have my mobile phone with Telstra until its contract runs out as it has a very expensive break fee.

So, our first months bills were as follows:

$14.55 VOIP

$83 Phone and Net

$97.55 TOTAL plus my mobile of around $40/month.

From paying around $200 per month, we have managed to drop right back to only $140! We are VERY happy with this and hope that the following few months show the savings to be similar to this first month.

And what of the Customer Service from MyNetFone and Westnet you ask? WONDERFUL!! When we first installed the VOIP there were a few technical hitches due to the way our home network is set up, but their tech was happy to be on the phone to me (at their cost) for as long as it took to solve the problem – and it ended up being almost 2 hours…. And he was VERY patient with me not really understanding a whole lot!

Westnet have also been great – there was a bit of a delay getting our service set up, but they were so helpful when I called to query it and all of the staff members I have spoken to have been so nice and polite – very different to our previous experiences…

So there you have it – our Telecommunications story! And you know even more than making some dramatic financial savings and finally being treated like a customer and not a number, the biggest thrill for us has been being able to say goodbye to a big company and support smaller companies.

I’ll also update our Electricity usage as well – another good week for us in that respect too!