I just got my phone bill from AT&T this month. Since I live in Oklahoma I use Southwestern Bell and AT&T for my long distance. I also try to use the 10-10-numbers. But, I'm going to have to try something different. Most of my calls are out-of-state( to a daughter in the service in Texas). What are you folks doing on your phone service. Also, while we're close to the subject; how do you handle your internet service? Mine is local at $18 a month. Back to the phone question; do you think that a cell phone would work in place of my reqular phone service. I can't keep up with all the rate changes that these phone compnies use. About the time I think that I have finally figured them out, they will change them or drop them.

-- terrell (terrell@tanet.net), June 26, 2000

Answers

What a timely posting. We too just got our AT&T phone bill and after I got up off the floor from a dead faint, I went and talked to my husband about our $334.00 long distance bill. He is the one that is primarily on the phone because I am at work all day and even when I am home I am rarely on the phone because I do enough talking on it when I am at work. We discussed changing to some other calling plan or other options like you mentioned. There is no real solution. The problem is that the long distance companies give you that seven or five cent a minute but they are only for long distance calls made out of your state. The in state calls are at a much higher rate and most people make their long distance calls within their own state and it really adds up. I'm not aware of any service that has the same rate for all calls, in state or out but that would be a good option if it existed.

The good news for us, in a sense, is that when my husband went over the phone bill because he couldn't believe how high it was, he found an international call to Madagascar over our computer phone line for $212. We did not make that call and luckily the billing agent we spoke to at AT&T believed us because we had no history of international calls so this would have been very unusual for us. She took it off our bill along with an erroneous charge of $10.88 for an operator assisted call which was an overcharge for that service and the attendant taxes that were connected with all of that. Bottom line was she took $250 off of our bill.

The next dilemma is to figure out how the call happened on our computer. It was obviously done by a hacker, in fact, the billing agent for AT&T says this is happening all the time now.

We had recently signed on for two computer to computer free phone calling services, DialPad and Phonefree, and I suspect that is how these calls were hacked. So we unsubscribed from the free service and took it all off of our computer. Hopefully, that was how it happened and we won't have a problem again. If we do, I expect the next step will be to have some kind of block put on all long-distance calls from our computer phone number because we will only be using it for internet and that is a local call. Incidentally, we pay $179 for a year with Erols which is the internet provider we have and we have been very happy with their service.

So, just an additional warning for all of you who have internet access as you obviously do if you are on this forum, better check over your long distance bills to make sure someone isn't using your computer phone line for their calls. If the amount of money had not been so high, I probably would have paid it without looking at it and who knows how long they would have been taking advantage of me.

-- Colleen (pyramidgreatdanes@erols.com), June 26, 2000.

We've tried ATT and MCI, and they're both the same in my opinion. High $$ for so-so service. And I don't understand why "in-state" long distance has to cost more than out-of-state long distance. Must be a marketing ploy. Internet phones - I'm not ready for that yet, and haven't looked into the technology and surrounding issues. $18/month is good for an ISP - hopefully they're a local call. I have an account from my company, but I also have a free "Bluelight" account as a backup (I lucked out and they had a POP that was local to me).

I'm thinking about investing in a net-cam, and telling my wife her relatives need to buy one too, and then let them use Microsoft Netmeeting to talk.

-- Eric in TN (ems@nac.net), June 26, 2000.

You call 10-10-811 + 1 + area code + seven digit number. It's 5 cents per minute. Instate or out. Minimum 10 minute call. No monthly service fee.I like knowing exactly what I am paying.Just 5 cents any time of the day or night.I have had no surprises.

-- Bonnie (josabo1@juno.com), June 26, 2000.

A friend turned me on to this. You do not have to have a long distance service in Oklahoma. He and I went to Sam's and purchased a phone card for $59.00 for 1000 minutes. We then cancelled our long distance phone service. We had to call several times on one service to get it stopped. The phone card tells you each call how many minutes you have left. For $59.00 a card and your service of $18.00 mo that is $216.00 a year or almost 4000 minutes on a phone card. The card at Sam's is about 5.9 cents a minute. Hope this helps.

-- John Maughan (jmaughan@mmcable.com), June 26, 2000.

I use prepaid service at www.bigzoo.com You prepay on net using a credit card or bank debit card with Visa or Mastercard printed on it. You used to be able to buy $5 at a time, but they raised it to $10 last time I recharged my account. Anyway you get a toll free access number and a pin number. Your account is updated quickly after any recharge or phone call. In lower 48 states its 3.9 cents per minute (in state or out) 24 hours a day. Only extra charge is if you call from a pay phone. They then add 50cents per call to reimburse pay phone owner.

The only downside is that access number gets busy at prime calling time in evening, so you can have to dial several times. Also you have to do a lot of dialing just to make one call. Sound quality is good.

I've also experimented with totally free dialpad service off net. It works but real clumsy using speakers and mike that came with computer. I'd get a hand set if I was serious about using it.

As to computer access, there are many free-ISPs. Just have to find one with free local access number. Even then if there is no local ISP of any kind like happened to friend in Kansas, you can pay so much a month to your local phone company to have unlimited access to a number outside of your local calling area and pick a number for a free ISP. At least you dont have to pay for both access and an ISp. I've tried many free ISPs. Most work adequately and are reliable. (They are getting better.) I havent had a paid ISP for several months. I like WorldSpy (no banners) best, but they temporarily discontinued local access numbers here. Right now I am using NetZero and Address.net. I found hack istructions on net to get rid of banner on both. ( NetZero is just plain obnoxious if you dont hack its banner.) Others such as theSimpsons.com, BlueLight, and Ameritrade arent too bad especially if you have at least a 17 inch monitor.

Oh and I should add that some of these ISPs ask lot of personal questions at sign up. Make up whatever answers you want. Its all machine done and IWANT TOBE ANONYMOUS is as good as your real name. Just do give correct area code so you get appropriate chose of access numbers. Freei is only ISP that doesnt at least ask your name.

-- Hermit John (ozarkhermit@pleasedontspamme.com), June 26, 2000.

I use dialpad.com to make all my long distance calls, its absolutely free and the quality is usually fairly good, comparable to a lower- quality regular telephone call, you need to get a headset with a boom microphone to use it effectively though, otherwise you get a hollow echo when you are talking.
I had to go with them because direct dialing from Iceland to Alaska was easily costing me $200 a month or more.

-- Dave (AK) (daveh@ecosse.net), June 26, 2000.

Dialpad.com has cut our bill $80 a month. We love it. We also use the Sam's calling cards. Huge difference in our bills. Try the dialpad, a $10 or $5 headset has worked great for us.

-- Anne (HT@HM.com), June 26, 2000.

Look up www.ultracall.com

We found this through a Consumer Report mag. article. 13.9 cents a minute in-state and 6.9 cents a minute out-of-state all the time. You can also get a calling card and 1-800 number with no monthly fees. Consumer Report listed it as a "no catch" program. We have been satisfied with the service.

-- Vaughn (vdcjm5@juno.com), June 26, 2000.

I'm in Texas. I use 1010636 as a prefix, then dial the full phone number including the 1+ area code. There is no monthly fee, and calls are .05/minute in state or out. Most of my long distance is to Oklahoma, and this cut my phone bill from $90 or so to about $25, including all the wonderful little surcharges that are now on the phone bill.

-- (ratdogs10@yahoo.com), June 27, 2000.

If you live in IL, try 10-10-297 for in-state long distance. 5 cents a minute, anytime. The usual taxes apply, but no extra or surprise charges. It has worked well for us. Right now, I've got AT&T 5 cents anytime long distance (state to state) with no service fees, but not for long. Then I search again for lower rates. If you drop your regular service, Terrell, how will you connect to the internet? Do the pre-paid phone cards work for in- and out-of state calls?

-- Jean (schiszik@tbcnet.com), June 27, 2000.

I got mine last week and jumped for joy! I have cut it down to $35.00. We still have long distance, but I'm going to check into getting that off in Kentucky like referenced above. The way we did it was to add to our currect cellular phone service. (necessary for work) We get reimbursed for $30 a month for cellular service if we pay for our beeper service ourselves. We called and added 200 minutes of free long distance on a new service for $5.00. We pay the difference. Any time that we can, we make long distance calls on our cell phone. Sometimes the connections are not great, but for quick informational calls they can save a fortune (It is also long distance to reach each other from our home to work place). Our net savings is around $50 a month. There are still times when the phone is with hubby and I have to use our regular line so I will certainly be investigating my options. One pointer though, when we tried to sign up for this promotion they punched everything into their computer and said "Now you're all set with monthly service for $45.00" We showed them the promotion and they quickly said " Oh, our mistake, $35 a month"

-- Jennifer (KY) (acornfork@hotmail.com), June 28, 2000.

I too, was frustrated with my AT&T bill. I'm in the process of switching to GCI which offers $10.99/mo for unlimited internet access, web site, and .10/minute long distance. Should save us quite a bit as we've been paying $18 for ISP and $5 for our AT&T service. I'm going to consider one of the above mentioned savings for long distance. Just hate to dial all those numbers! Jill

-- Jill Schreiber (schreiber@santanet.com), June 29, 2000.

My advise would be to look into prepaid phone cards. I have seen them as low as 2 1/2 cents a minute (in Georgia). I would NOT recommend a cell phone, as they can be quite costly, even more so than a regular telephone bill. We use AT&T, have for years, and are quite satisfied with it. I think we have the 7 cents a minute plan and something like $4/ month service charge. This works for us because even though hubby has out of state family, they usually call us (they know we are only on 1 income, so they try to respect that).

Also I use Bluelight.com internet service. It is free, from K-mart and Yahoo. I really like it. It has a few minor problems, but nothing that you can't live with (hey, it's free). You can type "free internet service" into a search engine and come up with a lot of different ones. Then you can just download it onto your computer! I think it was worth it. We were paying over $300/ year for AOL and now we pay nothing with almost as good service!

-- Linda (botkinhomeschool@yahoo.com), June 29, 2000.

We found AT&T to be extremely sneaky. Although I know people do steal numbers, the errors on your phone bills may just be part of their "let's see if we can get away with it" attitude. They changed the time that our rates went up (from 8 to 7 a.m. and from 5 to 7 p.m.) with virtually no notification and were totally unapologetic when we discovered that our carefully-timed calls were being charged the day rate! We have switched to Working Assets and found them to be extremely helpful and customer-friendly. We pay $4.95/month and all out of state calls are 9 cents/minute; in-state calls are 10 cents a minute all day every day (we have that option here in our area but I don't think it's available everywhere). Another $1 will make all calling card calls 25 cents -- high but not as bad as could be. Any problems, we have gotten gracious help with. Plus part of the $$ goes to causes we believe in. It may not be the absolute cheapest ever, but I make a lot of business calls during the day and it's reliable and simple and I feel good about using that service. Karen in TN

-- Karen Fletcher (drquotes@hotmail.com), July 01, 2000.

-- I just got my phone bill from AT&T this month --

Ah yes, the good ol' boys! I quit AT&T several years ago. Didn't appreciate the $7.50/mo. charge even if I didn't pick up the phone. I've used a 10-10 number for almost 3 years. No monthly fee. No huge tax added on like AT&T. It's always been 10"/minute 24/7. They do have 5"/minute, but there's a 30" minimum and they told me I would wind up paying more, with the way I use my phone, than if I stay with the 10"/minute. I checked it out, they were right! I do not have a chosen long distance carrier with my phone company. And I check periodically to make sure I haven't been slammed. (Dial '00'. If you have a long distance carrier, they will answer with their name. Mine says something about I have to have a long distance company access code to make the call.)

-- ~Rogo, South Central Texas (rogo2020@yahoo.com), July 01, 2000.

Just want to say I'd stay away from a 10-10 company called WorldxChange in California. I used one of ther numbers for about 3 months and each month got a monthly fee of 6 or 7 bucks. On calling them thy say ---mistake, we will adjust, but next time same thing. There rates are low--4 cents but they "HAVE WAYS" Don

-- Don (dairyagri@yahoo.com), July 02, 2000.