Telephone

If you are paying more than £20-25 per month for phone line rental, phone calls and broadband internet, all inclusive, you are paying too much.

We switched to Talktalk about two years ago and have saved about 50% per year on what we were paying. It has to be said that our experience of Talktalk's customer service was not exactly positive at the beginning, but we haven't had to call them in eighteen months, so it's no longer an issue. Our previous monopoly supplier's customer service was hardly a joy to deal with either. 

(Unfortunately I'd have to revise the above slightly. After trying to move house and keep the same telephone number,  I can now safely say that Talktalk has the worst customer service I have ever experienced in my life. If  you are sure that you will never, ever need to speak to their customer service department and are happy to be locked into a Talktalk contract for life (with a new phone number every time you move) then it might be a good idea signing up with them, otherwise it's probably best just to be grateful that their arrival on the scene forced other companies to lower their prices.)

(Though of course, I spoke too soon: that is before experiencing the delights of BT's customer service again. It turned out that BT were not able to keep our phone number of ten years for us as promised, and the call centre tag we endured on switching back to them made Talktalk look like amateurs at call centre hell. I should have paid more attention to the article I had just read on BT being awarded Which's worst customer service award:

http://www.techwatch.co.uk/2009/07/02/bt-wins-worst-customer-service-title/

At the time of switching back I found it difficult to believe that anyone could actually offer worse customer service than Talktalk - I was wrong...

... so the outcome of several weeks of pain, and still no phone line or broadband connection is that hopefully Talktalk will get round to connecting us sometime soon and it won't be quite as painful as the first time. Paying twice the price to BT for even more abysmally bad customer service than Talktalk didn't seem like such a good idea after all in the end.)

I'm reliably informed by a relative that PlusNet offers similar pricing to Talktalk without the disastrous customer service. So perhaps we might give them a whirl when our enforced eighteen months with Talktalk is over. Though said relative failed to inform me that PlusNet is now owned by BT. It's a funny old world. (And not that we really have that much to complain about with Talktalk now that we have a line and broadband connection again and don't have to talk to their customer service department any more.)

Several of the utilities comparison sites on our price comparison page allow you to compare phone tariffs as well as this specialist site:

http://www.homephonechoices.co.uk/

Internet Phones (VoIP)

Companies such as Talktalk aim to make back what they lose on landline services with expensive charges for calls to mobiles.

The answer is to get yourself an internet phone, such as the Grandstream BT-201 or an adapater such as the HandyTone-486 which allows you to use a normal phone as an internet phone and sign up for an internet phone service such as Sipgate.

You can join Sipgate for free and they give you a free landline phone number (which you can use as a second phone number). Calls to other Sipgate users, and users of some other internet telephony providers, are entirely free. 

Calls to landlines anywhere in the world at any time of day or night are pennies, and calls to mobile phones are about a third cheaper than with Talktalk.

So to make sure we pay the absolute minimum for phone calls we use Talktalk for phoning landline numbers (for free) and we use our internet phone for calling mobiles and 0870 numbers (if we can't find a non-0870 alternative, see below).

I have found Sipgate's call quality and website service absolutely first class.

You can also use Sipgate with a software phone and microphone or USB phone on your computer in the same way that you can use Skype for making free or cheap internet phone calls. Personally I have found Sipgate to be a lot more reliable with better call quality than Skype.  

Mobile Phones

The simplest way of wasting money on phones is to sign up for a mobile phone contract. They are criminally expensive. What you should do instead is shop around for the cheapest pay as you go tariff (Orange and Virgin were the cheapest when I bought a pay as you go phone earlier this year) and make as few mobile calls as possible. Receiving calls is free so you are still as contactable as ever and you can still use the mobile very economically for making the occasional urgent call.

A pay as you go Sony Ericsson W200i with cameraphone, FM radio and MP3 player costs all of £29.99 - less than a single month's payment on most mobile contracts.

Mobile Broadband

One thing that proved useful recently whilst both BT and Talktalk proved incapable of providing a broadband connection without a wait reminiscent of the GDR was a pay as you go mobile broadband dongle.

I bought one from Three as it looked like the cheapest option. It was £19.99 for the dongle and £10 for the first PAYG topup. Vodafone were offering the same thing for £45 including £15 topup. Buying from Three was the wrong decision. They made it as difficult as possible to use the dongle with Linux (I ended up having to borrow a Windows PC to use the Three installation software to find out what my user password was) even though the dongle actually works fine technically with Linux. The broadband connectivity I've experienced with Three has been patchy  and they also have a scam which involves deleting all your remaining broadband allowance every thirty days so that you have to top up once a month no matter what. On top of that it is practically impossible to make a credit card top up the first time on the web without ringing up an expensive 0870 number to be guided around an idiocy on the Three website. Vodafone in contrast offer Linux installation software on their website and according to their promotion material (and the packaging in the shops) there is no time limit on topups. So given the same choice over again I would have chosen Vodafone (surprisingly as they have always struck me as expensive.) Vodafone have also now reduced their price to £35 including a £15 topup. Sadly Vodafone refuse to provide a sim card only service, insisting that you buy a new dongle (although technically I don't believe there's any reason why you couldn't use the Huawei Three dongle with Vodafone) despite lots of users asking for a sim card only service on their web forum - so I shall never get to find out whether the Vodafone service is any better than Three. By the time I've finally got fed up of Three deleting my broadband allowance at the end of every month, hopefully Talktalk will have got round to activating our broadband, and it might even work...

By the way, what is it with bank and telecoms call centres? Why are they so utterly abysmal? Is it the fact that no one operator ever gets to deal with the same customer or the same issue for more than five minutes, or do they deliberately make the service as bad as possible to scam you on the 0870 fees and/or stop you from ringing them?

Avoid 0870 numbers

The "say no to 0870" website helps you find alternative standard rate numbers to call companies rather than the extremely expensive 0870 numbers that they profit from you ringing them on:

http://www.saynoto0870.com/search.php

It works for all 08** type numbers (including 0871, 0845, 0800, 0808 etc.)

Don't ring directory enquiries

Use BT's free web service instead:

http://www.thephonebook.bt.com/publisha.content/en/search/residential/search.publisha

The Telephone Preference Service

The TPS won't directly save you any money, but if it's even partially true that time is money, then it might do so indirectly. 

We used to get calls from companies at all times of the day, and sometimes even night, trying to sell us things we didn't want. We signed up to the telephone preference service, which allows you to refuse to receive unsolicited marketing calls and now we practically never receive any cold calls. We were amazed at first at how effective it is. If someone does slip through the net, which probably only happens once or twice a year, you only have to mention TPS to them and they hang up immediately - which is not surprising, as they could be fined £5,000 otherwise. It's very simple, and entirely free, to register for TPS on this website:

http://www.mpsonline.org.uk/tps/ 

Re-cycle or re-sell old mobiles

Old mobile phones are full of toxic chemicals, so you should never just throw them away. 

This website has information on re-cycling mobile phones:

http://www.recycle.co.uk/mobiles/

If for some (non-thrifty) reason you have a mobile you no longer need, you could also try selling it to one of these sites:

http://www.mazumamobile.com/
http://www.mopay.co.uk/
http://www.envirofone.com/?source=10086
http://moneysupermarket.love2recycle.com/Trader/Search.aspx 

There is now even a comparison site which lets you compare the prices offered by various mobile phone re-cycling companies:

http://www.compare-phonerecyclers.com

Television

I have to admit it's always been a bit of a mystery to me why people pay £30 - 60 per month for a satellite TV subscription.

However now there really is no need to do so.

If you are addicted to satellite TV you can now receive 140 channels (including HDTV) absolutely free through Freesat:

http://www.freesat.co.uk

The website explains exactly what you need to do to receive Freesat.

For the non-satellite-TV-addicted there is Freeview with 48 channels, including ones that you used to have to pay for like Film on 4:

http://www.freeview.co.uk/

All you need for that is a set top box for about £20

If you would like to record hundreds of hours of TV, pause TV, record one programme whilst watching another programme, all for free, with a very simple remote control, you could always invest in a  TVonics recorder (designed, though unfortunately not made, in Wales). Although the upfront cost of the recorder may be a lot, it's far less even in the short term than paying for something like Sky+ or the Virgin equivalent. We've now got more films recorded than we're ever likely to get round to watching.

If you are thinking of buying an additional TV, don't. Just buy a USB TV stick to plug into the back of your PC and then you can use your computer for watching, recording and storing digital TV instead. The Asus MyCinema U3100 is very good and works well with Linux as well as Windows (if you haven't got round to moving to a cheaper operating system yet...)