Looking to reduce my bills please....

alfieroux

Ok, I'm hoping someone can help me here as my head is spinning! My husband and I are not very technical but realise that we need to tighten up our household bills.

We have BT Unlimited Weekend Plan for the phone - Line rental is £13.60 per month. A lot of our calls are during the week so our last bill came in at £94 in calls for the quarter! Taking our bill to £134.98.

We also have Virgin Media Broadband at £18.35 per month. This is 8Mb but as we live miles away from any exchange I assume that we don't need that much.

We very rarely download music, never films/TV etc, just use it for shopping, surfing and our young children potter around on it. We do not have (nor really need) any TV package as the Freeview stuff suits us fine.

I am very concious when looking around the other threads that we seem to be paying an awful lot for not very much, and TV adverts all state we can have the moon on a stick for £20 per month.

Can anyone advise me as to where to start - do I get both Broadband and Telephone from the same company, and if so which ones? I know we have service from BT and Virgin. I don't think TalkTalk or Sky service our village though.

Hopefully someone can point me in the right direction.

Many thanks in advance
Alfie

macman

£94 on calls per quarter-yikes-you shouldn't be charged that much in a year! If you are going to stay with BT, the very first thing to do is to switch your calls to Anytime, which will cost you about a fiver per month and give you unlimited landline calls, thus saving you in the region of £316 pa. You are just throwing away money by sticking on Unltd Weekend plan with your calling habits.
Check out your broadband option on www.samknows.com, do an exchange search and look for your LLU providers, these will be the cheapest deals for you.
Both TT and Sky service all exchanges but you may not be able to get them LLU. VM are just reselling the BT service, so not very cheap. It's most unlikely that you are getting anything near 8MBps if you are miles from the exchange.
You can take both services from different companies if you wish, but you don't have to.

HappyMJ

Why are you on unlimited weekend plan when you make most of your calls during the peak weekday hours? You'd save a fortune even sticking with BT and switching to the anytime plan. You should use MSE's callchecker for every call.

alfieroux

Thank you both for the swift response!

HappyMJ - I didn't know that the callchecker tool existed. I have just found it thank you, so will definitely follow up on that.

macman - I will contact BT this afternoon and see about changing our package. Can I ask what LLU stands for? I will go and look at the link that you sent me next.

Both Virgin and BT say I am getting 2Mb according to their webpage tools - so obviously I do not need to be paying for a flashy package.

Finally if I change my Broadband to BT do I have to lose my Virgin email address? And vice versa - if I change the phone to Virgin do I lose the BT phone number? Sorry if this seems a bit dim of me.

Alfie

macman

Local Loop Unbundled.
You can change your call package through your online account if you don't want to waste time with BT's call centre.
Just get a GMail address (takes 10 minutes to set up an account) and then you have an ISP-independent email address forever.
You will lose your email address, but swapping providers as you propose doesn't require a change of number. However, why would you switch your calls to VM-VM is the most expensive telephony n the UK.

alfieroux

Thank you - My plan of action is as follows then...

• I will change my package with BT and avoid Virgin's telephone package.
• I have set up a Hotmail email address and will spend some time saving my contacts and changing passwords etc today.
• I will sign up to one of the Callchecker companies that you pointed out to me.
• I will phone Virgin up and see if they can do me a better deal and if not, will move my broadband over to BT for less per month than running the two seperately.

I have the afternoon to get all this done so fingers crossed I will be better off by tea time:D

Thank you for the nod in the right direction. This is not my specialism (as I am sure you can tell) I'd much rather be saving pennies using up leftovers in the fridge, but obviously wasting pounds by neglecting the technical stuff. Here comes the new me...

Alfie

macman

I'm sure that you can do a lot better than BT for your broadband-have a look at the samknows LLU options first, post the results if you are in doubt.
If no LLU suppliers are available, then consider one of the non-LLU resellers such as Plusnet.

alfieroux

After going to the samKnows site the following was displayed:



The following table details the availability of LLU services at your location.

• AOL is not yet available in your area
• O2 / Be Unlimited is not yet available in your area
• Bulldog (C&W) is not yet available in your area
• TalkTalk (CPW) has not yet unbundled your exchange
• Sky Broadband / Easynet is not yet available in your area
• Edge Telecom is not yet available in your area
• Entanet is not yet available in your area
• Lumison is not yet available in your area
• Newnet is not yet available in your area
• Node4 is not yet available in your area
• Pipex is not yet available in your area
• Smallworld Media is not yet available in your area
• Tiscali is not yet available in your area
• Tiscali TV is not yet available in your area
• Orange is not yet available in your area
• WB Internet is not yet available in your area
• Zen is not yet available in your area

This was under the LLU heading!

alfieroux

Just to clarify my thoughts really but here goes:

Spoke to Virgin first they offered:

• Unlimited broadband + calls at £12.50 per month (I will need BT line rental still at £13.90 per month) 12 month contract.

or

• Unlimited broadband without calls at £12.85 per month (still £6 per month cheaper than paying at minute!)

Then spoke to BT who offered:

• Anytime calls, broadband and line rental at £23.90 on an 18 month contract

or

• Anytime calls and line rental without broadband at £18.90 on a 12 month contract

So I think therefore that if I continue as am with virgin BB + BT calls then it works out at £31.75 - not the most cost effective method!

I haven't yet contacted any other companies. I do not know about PlusNet but samknows site suggests I can use them. So will wander off there next....

Plusnet is complicated!
BB only = 6.49 for first 3 months then £12.99 (+£25 set up fee)
BB+ Line rental + anytime calls = £21.98 for first 3 months then £28.48

macman

The samknows results indicate that your exchange currently has no LLU operators (small or rural exchange?), but implies that TT are in the process of unbundling that exchange. So TT would (soon) be cheapest, but that doesn't mean that they are recommended.
Check the TT exchange status here for an LLU date:
http://www.talktalkmembers.com/content/view/109/149/#idxG