Updated: Monday 16 January, 2012
By Anthony Hill - anthony.hill@consumerchoices.co.uk
Whether you’re ringing to say “hola”, “bonjour” or “g’day”, signing up to a TalkTalk home phone package with cheap international calls could help you reduce your monthly landline bills.
If your household frequently makes calls to friends or family overseas, chances are you’re feeling the pinch of costly international call rates in your monthly home phone bills.
For example, if you’re a BT customer, a 10 minute call to France in the evening will cost you £1.20 (plus an 13.1p one-off BT call connection fee). Making regular international calls like this could soon cost you a lot of cash. However, switching your home phone to TalkTalk (www.talktalk.co.uk) could get you cheap international calls around the world.
If you're a TalkTalk (www.talktalk.co.uk) home phone customer, or if you bundle your phone with a TalkTalk broadband package, you'll be able to take advantage of special deals that help to cut the cost of your calls.
Customers on the Essentials or Plus package can add the International Calls Boost for £2.99. This will allow you to make unlimited free calls to 36 international destinations including Australia, France and the US.
You'll also get discounts of up to 95% on calls to other international destinations.
If you've only got TalkTalk’s home phone service - without broadband - then you can buy the Global Saver add-on to help cut the cost of international calls.
For example, adding Global Saver will cut the cost of a daytime landline call to Australia from 27.8p a minute to just 2.04p.
You can also save on the cost of calling mobile phones abroad. The standard rate for a daytime mobile call to the US is 17.7p per minute for example, but with the Global Saver add-on this can be cut down to just 2.04p.
If you’re locked into a contract by your current home phone supplier and can’t switch to TalkTalk, or don’t necessarily want to, you could make cheap calls using your broadband connection.
Using an internet phone service (also known as VoIP), such as those from Vonage (www.vonage.co.uk) or Skype, can help dramatically reduce your bills, particularly if you sign-up to a tariff that offers free international calls or free calls to landlines using the same service. Have a look at some of the packages below:
For more information, read our Vonage sign-up FAQs.
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