. I was irked to see my AT&T phone/Internet bill today for $50. It went up by $5, and I never make long distance calls on it.
But it went up last month as well, and when it did, I spoke to customer service and she found a $5 promotion which she applied to the bill and said it was good for a year, so my bill was to go back down to $45 a month ($21 for the land line and $25 for the Internet).
That $21 a month for the phone does NOT include long distance, but it's been no biggie becus I've been in the habit of buying prepaid phone cards at about .03 a minute, and I figured it was cheaper to pay that only when I make long distance calls, rather than paying a fixed monthly fee when I really don't make a lot of long distance calls.
So when the bill went up to $50 again this month, I called to complain and she said oh, the person you spoke to last month probably didn't see that you're already getting a $5 loyal customer discount and you can't tack on more than one.
Then she told me about their Emergency use only plan, which is just $7.45 a month (compared to the $21 I'm paying now for the phone portion of the bill). With this plan, all incoming calls are free, as are local calls out, but any long distance calls I make are .41 a minute, which happens to be the rate I would otherwise be paying under my existing plan except that I use those calling cards with a toll free number.
So, not sure if this was the right move, but I went for the Emergency use only plan. I don't have a cell phone, so i might be restricting myself too much, but i really liked the idea of reducing a monthly bill by over $13 a month.
I specifically asked about the calling cards i use with the toll-free numbers, becus i rely on these to make any long distance call. She said with the toll free number they'd be charged at .03 a minute.
So yeah, it would be on top of the roughly .03 a minute i alreaday pay for the calling cards themselves, but i still think paying .06 a minute per call will wind up being cheaper than a flat monthly fee that's assessed whether i use the phone or not.
Put another way, i could make up to 450 minutes of long distance calls a month (7.5 hours x .03/minute = $13.50, using my calling cards) and still pay no more than i'm paying now, and probably less. I find it hard to believe I would spend that much time on long distance calls.
If I didn't have the calling cards to use for long distance calls it wouldn't make sense, so if that customer service rep was wrong about toll-free numbers being billed at .03 and i actually got charged at the .41 a minute rate, then I'd have to switch back. She said long distance is anything where you have to dial a 1 before the number. But you have to dial 1 before a toll-free number, but maybe that's different.
What do you think?
Maybe not a smart move to save $ on phone bill?
April 14th, 2012 at 01:55 pm
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