Got the phone bill for my land line today, and unsurprisingly, mobile calls tops the chart and occupied 82% of the bill. Currently for someone in Australia, it is expensive making phone calls to other mobile phones on either Australian’s GSM or CDMA network — even more expensive than STD and international calls! In fact it is actually cheaper for me to call my father’s mobile phone in Taiwan, then to call my wife’s phone on Optus network. However, it is also becoming necessary to call someone’s mobile phone, as it is currently a more reliable way to reach somebody.

How then, can I make cheaper mobile calls and reduce my monthly bill? I have looked at some possible solutions, but would also love to hear your suggestions.

Landline

Most households would have their landline connected to Telstra, and will be using their service to make calls to mobile phones. HomeLine Plus is probably the best full-service plan if you make lots of calls, but looking at the figure it is not cheap. I assume that everyone would have their landline connected so there is no connection fee, and the recurring fee includes the ever-increasing Telstra line rental. 35 cent flagfall is ridiculous, and 37 cent/minute to non-Telstra network (3, Vodafone, Optus, etc) is actually expensive.

However it does have call cap ($2.50) for 20 minute mobile calls to Telstra network. Not that useful as (1) it doesn’t help short calls (which is frequent), and (2) only business-type people have Telstra mobile plans, and I don’t have those friends :)

Currently I have both my ADSL and long-distance phone service with Exetel, a “no-frills” telecommunication company in Sydney Australia. Their mobile calling rate is amongst the cheapest at 30 cents/minute with 20 cents flagfall.

However, as Exetel does not do full-service and only handles STD, IDD and mobile calls, you still have Telstra managing your local calls (and calls to 1300/1800 numbers). In this case, you are automatically transferred to Telstra “HomeLine Part” plan, which the line rental costs $31.95 per month (just raised in December 2005), and you have to pay more expensive local call rates on top of that!

But, if you are also an Exetel ADSL subscriber, you are entitled to ADSL plans that are $5 cheaper with higher quota, and it will further deduct 10% (ex-GST) of phone bill from your ADSL bill each month. Therefore it turns out still cheaper than going full-service with Telstra, and cheaper calls to mobile phones as well.

PhoneChoice.com.au has a comparison matrix of landline to mobile rates. Exetel’s landline service is not included (probably because it is not a full-service), but it appears cheaper than all of them.

Mobile Phone

Mobile phone plans are confusing — there are monthly plans with contract, and there are also prepaids. Then some plans have caps — you are getting potentially more than you have paid for. Some prepaids have recharge bonus, which also gives you more than you have paid for. Therefore at the end it can be very difficult to calculate the best solution. We actually have a church friend (Steven) who works in a software company that specialise plan optimisation!

However, using mobile phones to call other mobile phones seem to be a feasible solution. I am using Revolution Telecom‘s prepaid service as an example, as they do have a very low mobile to mobile rate — 20 cents/minute with 20 cents flagfall. It has a recurring monthly cost of $5.15, which is calculated from 15 cents/day access fee + 1 recharge (50 cents) per month. It might vary depending on how often you recharge.

The recurring fee is actually a bit deceiving. If you want to have ADSL and flat rate local calls at home, you still need a landline, which means $30 line rental. The daily access fee of Revolution Telecom is actually calculated on top of your existing line rental. At the same time, you might not need to keep another mobile phone, which means more saving there.

Currently Revolution is running a “Believer” Deal, which gives you $100 credit if you let them auto top-up your account with $80 over 4 months (i.e. $80 over 4 month and you get $180 worth of credit). Good if you are making lots of mobile calls.

Another issue with mobile to mobile is call quality. It goes through GSM network twice, which really reduce the sound quality.

Voice over IP

Voice over IP (VoIP) is an emerging technology that is going to rock the telecommunication work. In fact one of my goal for this year is to migrate my landline to VoIP, as it offers good quality calls and bundled features at a very good price.

However at the moment one of the biggest drawback for VoIP is its setup cost. To make calls via SIP-based VoIP, you can get either:

• VoIP Phone: Plug the phone into a Ethernet hub to make calls. From $100.
• Analogue Telephone Adapter (ATA): Plug in your home/cordless phone, and then plug ATA to hub to make calls. From $80.
• USB phone/headset: Plug into computer to make calls. From $20.
• Softphone: Run the program, and use computer’s mic/speaker to make calls. Usually free.

There are heaps of issues to consider. For example, is your broadband connection suitable for making VoIP calls? Is your router capable of quality of service (QoS) control, so that your VoIP packets can take priority? Do you use the right codec?

To try it out, I used SIPME‘s prepaid service, which costs $10 to get started. There is no recurring fee as what a true pre-paid should be. Call rates at 27 cents/minute is quite good, and there appears to be no flagfall/connection fee for each call.

There are many other VoIP companies in Australia offering good call rates. Some are prepaid and some are monthly plans, and they are even more confusing than the mobile phone plans. I chose SIPME because it offers a low initial fee to get up and going ($10 which becomes your credit), and the call rate is pretty good.

Since I am only trailing, I use CounterPath’s X-Lite softphone (free download). It is very configurable, and works well with my siproxd setup (got complicated firewall at home). However it only can use GSM codec when connecting to SIPME, and the voice quality is nothing exciting. It would be possible to use G729 with SIPME, but I have not been able to find a free softphone that supports this codec.

It also limits yourself to your computer (if you are using a softphone or USB handset/headset), which is not always ideal.

Another VoIP company to consider is Skype. It uses its own P2P protocol to transmit your voice, and its SkypeOut service allows you to call Australian mobiles for 0.165 Euro/minute (which is around 26.5 cents Australian at the moment). Minimum recharge is 10 Euro, but then it displays AUD$16.00 when I first recharged.

Call quality is significantly better than X-Lite + SIPME probably due to its codec. However, you are still bounded to your computer when you make calls. There is no flagfall/connection fee, and credit expires in 180 days after recharge.

Conclusion

I guess the best way is to take out your bill and check what is actually the best plan for you. At the moment I am trying out VoIP, but so far feel a bit disappointed with the quality. At the moment landline to mobile still tops the call quality but also the most expensive. I might actually consider Revolution (while bashing them previously) to reduce my phone bills.

Any other suggestions?