Cheapest UK Call Rates – Should BT Put a Lid on It’s Call Caps?
BT the UK’s largest telecoms provider is singing the praises of ‘capped calls’ and selling call plans on the basis of the savings these deals seem to offer – are these capped deals really that good or is this a financial smoke screen?.
The problem with trying to decide if these deals are good or bad is the difficulty in obtaining information – BTs website does not seem to give call rates up easiliy – their pricelist points visitors to 58 mult-page documents hence, information is lets just say not made easy to find. The helpless search utility provided by BT also proved equally challenging at delivering any form of digestable results – calling for information proved the best way.
Upon successfully uncovering the call rates for BT & most major UK telecoms operators I needed to establish the UK’s average call length.. Telecost performed this task a few years ago by analysing 2 million call records (2278614 to be precise) of 100 different companies in different parts of the UK. There was a wide range of company types in the study including high volume users such as: recruitment agencies, debt collection and media companies. It is of course difficult to know how representative the sample is however I don’t expect BT will dish this out willingly. The results are shown below:
Average length of call to mobile (07 numbers) – 110 seconds.
Average length of national call (01 numbers) – 112 seconds.
Average length of landline call (02 numbers) – 121 seconds.
Assuming that an average UK call length is 2 minutes then:
2 minute mobile call using BT Standard Rate to is 45p and to landline call is 15p including setup charge.
A 2 Minute call through BT’s ‘Business Plan’ to mobile would cost 25p (capped) and to landline would cost 8p on a 1 year contract.
A 2 minute mobile call using BT’s ‘Oneplan’ is 20p (capped) and a 2 minute landline call is 5p (capped) on a 2 year contract with additional BT services required.
A 2 minute mobile call using Westlake LCR is 18p and a 2 minute landline call is 2.5p on a one year contract.
A 2 minute call through Midland Telecom to mobile would cost 16p and to landline would cost 1.8p on a 1 year contract with a minimum spend requirement.
A 2 minute mobile call using Gradwell VOIP would cost 20p and a 2 minute landline call would be free (on all inclusive tarif) with 3 month contract.
The conclusion, based on the information above being correct therefore is:- if you own an ‘average’ business then you are better off with LCR or VOIP. If your bunsiness makes longer than average phonecalls then you are better off staying with BT, although…
The most efficient way to handle business calls is to use a telephone system such as Asterisk which is able to route calls via the most efficient methods: ie. route all national calls through VOIP hence take advantage of free calls and unlimited outbound trunks. Route mobile calls through GSM gateways to benefit from free calls to staff mobiles & mobile call rates of 4.5p. It is also not a bad idea to have a few BT lines on Oneplan to route long calls. This method also allows gives the user the benefit of mutiple failovers.
Call rates in this report were obtained in Sept 08 – some of the information above may or may not be accurate at the time you read this article hence this information should be treated as a yardstick.
Filed under: Business