Save $600pa on your home phone and internet

Short version: Swap to VoIP and naked DSL.

Below is my example on how to reduce your home phone and internet bill by $50/month.  Your mileage will vary.

I've been meaning to take a look at my parent's telecommunications for some time - they were with Telecom (and had been for sometime) for their phone line and broadband.  When they received a call from a Telecom rep offering them a sharper deal and mum called me for my opinion, I decided to stop being lazy and work out a better deal for them.

Their April bill was pretty standard:



 

After doing some research online, I found Snap offered the best deal for naked DSL, and used 2Talk for VoIP (I prefer VFX but they don't allow multiple concurrent registrations, meaning, I can't have one number registered to multiple devices). 

The spreadsheet I used to compare the two offerings was:

 



 

Foot notes:

• Snap naked broadband is $60 a month for 10GB, I added a $15 data pack to take it to 70GB (Telecom was only 60GB)
• I'm unsure about whether wire maintenance is still there, so I've added it to the Snap + 2Talk offering so as not to unfairly skew my results
• There is a one-off porting fee of $20 per number.

By porting (or moving) their main phone number to 2Talk, they were able to retain their residential phone number.  I also took their existing cordless phones and plugged them into the FXS ports on an old Draytek Vigor2700 router I had spare, which means they were able to keep using the phones they were used to.

New benefits:

• Saving $50 a month on their phone and internet bills
• Paying only 22 cents per minute for mobile calls (old rate was 46 cents).  Unfortunately they didn't make any national calls, so I had nothing to compare with.
• All of the 2Talk features, which include call waiting, caller display, voicemail-to-email to name a few (comprehensive list here)

The biggest vulnerability is if the internet goes down or if there's a power outage - since they couldn't remember the last time either happened, they were happy to resort to mobile, and didn't want to invest in an UPS (backup power supply).

If you lack the technical expertise to do this all yourself, the Orcon Genius can achieve the same thing in one device.

Finally, my biggest advice for anyone attempting this: porting numbers will drop any attached services.  If you port a phone number, and there's broadband on that line, the broadband will be disconnected.  Please check and double-check all details before attempting a number port.


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