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Making cheap calls to mobiles
By Becca Talbot - becca@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… (Updated 27/1/10)
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 17.37p and 29.63p per minute during the day, depending which network you are calling.
BT (www.bt.com), Britain’s largest home phone supplier, charges 12.5p per minute during the day for calls to mobiles, and 7.4p per minute for evening calls. When you include the call connection fee of 9.3p, a 10 minute call to someone’s mobile during the day will cost £1.34. 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 - TalkTalk (www.talktalk.co.uk) charges its landline customers 45p a month for Mobile Extra. If you add this to your contract, calls to mobiles on any network at anytime of the day will cost 7p per minute, instead of 12p per minute during the day and 7p per minute in the evenings.
- BT - BT’s Friends & Family Mobile Add-on costs £1.49 a month, and lets customers call UK mobiles for just 7.2p per minute at any time - saving 42% off BT standard rates.
- Virgin Media - The Talk Mobile add-on from Virgin Media costs £1.50 a month, and reduces the cost for a customer to call any mobile network to 11.25p per minute during the day and 7.5p per minute in the evening.
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 11.28p per minute for calls during the day and 6.7p per minute for calls made in the evening. This is a saving of 0.76p and 1.3p per minute respectively.
Choose an anytime calling plan
Some providers offer discounts on mobile calls if you sign-up to their anytime calls package. For example, Sky Talk (www.sky.com), which is only available to Sky TV customers, has two home phone tariffs - one for customers looking for just unlimited evening and weekend calls, and one for customers who need unlimited calls at anytime.
Customers who sign-up for the Sky Talk Unlimited anytime tariff can make calls to UK mobiles for just 9.78p per minute in the day and 5.87p in the evening - a saving of 2.45p and 1.47p per minute respectively when compared to Sky’s Freetime evening and weekend tariff.
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