Home phone Guides

Making cheap calls to mobiles

Updated: Thursday 19 January, 2012

By Anthony Hill - anthony.hill@consumerchoices.co.uk

Do you use your landline to regularly call mobile phones? Calling mobiles on your home phone can be costly, but we have tips to help you reduce your bills…

Unless you have signed up to a calling plan add-on from your home phone provider, calls to mobile numbers are not normally included in your free calls allowance (i.e. your unlimited calls), and are charged at a more expensive rate than calls to landlines.

For example, if you’re a Virgin Media (www.virginmedia.com) customer with a cable phone line, calls to mobiles cost between 19.35p and 31.61p per minute during the day, depending which network you are calling.

BT (www.bt.com), Britain’s largest home phone supplier, charges 13p per minute during the day for calls to mobiles, and 7p per minute for evening calls. When you include the call connection fee of 13.1p, a 10-minute call to someone’s mobile during the day will cost £1.42. This may not sound a lot, but if you frequently make this sort of calls, the costs soon mount up.

There are ways to avoid these high charges though - we explain a few below.

Call plan add-ons

If you do frequently call mobiles using your home phone, it may be worth getting a calling plan “add-on”, which will help reduce the cost of making calls to mobiles.

Some of the larger home phone suppliers offer these add-ons for a set monthly price. Below are details on some of the add-ons on offer that will help you make cheaper calls to mobiles:

• TalkTalk (www.talktalk.co.uk) charges its landline customers £2.99 a month for its 100 Mobile Minutes Boost. If you add this to your contract, you'll get 100 minutes worth of calls to mobiles on any network at anytime
• BT (www.bt.com) has a Friends & Family Mobile add-on which costs £1.50 a month. This lets customers call UK mobiles for just 7p per minute at any time - saving 45% off BT standard rates
• Virgin Media (www.virginmedia.com) offers the Talk Mobile add-on. It costs £1.50 a month, and reduces the cost for a customer to call any mobile network to 12.97p per minute during the day and 9.54p per minute in the evening.

Provider	Package Name	Service	Package Cost
	Talk UK Evening & Weekend	Mobile Extra costs 45p per month	£3.61
	Unlimited Weekend Plan	Friends & Family Mobile costs £1.49 a month	Free
	Phone L: Talk Evenings & Weekends	Talk Mobile costs £1.50 a month	£4.60

Get discounts on particular networks

Another way to save on mobile calls is to switch your home phone to YourCalls.net (www.yourcalls.net) - which offers its Golden Destination option.

The Golden Destination gives you a discount to either the country, mobile network or UK area that you call the most. So, if the majority of your friends and family are on the Orange mobile network, select Orange Mobile as your Golden Destination and you’ll be charged 12.04p per minute for calls during the day and 8p per minute for calls made in the evening. This is a saving of 1.46p and 0.5p per minute respectively.