the Price of a Landline with Unlimited Long Distance

We recently switched our landline phone service to an unlimited long distance calling plan which covers all local and regional calls, calls within the US including the US territories such as Puerto Rico, and calls to Canada. The plan package came with six additional call features: anonymous call rejection, caller id, call intercept, call forwarding, touch tone dialing, and one voice mail box. We are paying $61.99 monthly for the calling plan itself plus a federal excise tax fee of 36 cents, a federal subscriber line charge of $6.40, a federal universal service fee of 65 cents, a 911 disability access fee of 75 cents and $1.75 in state and local taxes for a total monthly bill of $71.88.

Prior to switching our landline calling plan we paid $67.79 to one provider for unlimited local and regional calling with seven call features plus we averaged around $30 a month with a second provider for our long distance calls. We are saving $25 a month with this new unlimited long distance plan. Plus, the provider is also our dsl provider, and they gave us an additional $8 discount off our monthly dsl fee. The switch was painless, all it took was one twenty minute phone call and a follow up verification phone call. We have not noticed any difference in the services rendered and are just enjoying the $33 a month savings. We did have to drop one of the special call features, in our case we chose to drop the three way calling function as we seldom used it. (We can still use the three way calling feature if we need it but there will be a 75 cent fee for doing so.) The only negative to all of this is that we didn't know about the unlimited long distance plan sooner. The various plans and rates aren't published anywhere, at least I have never seen them. I only found out about the new rates when I called the provider with a customer service question and they happened to ask why I hadn't upgraded plans. They send enough junk with the monthly bill that a notice about changes or choices in plans once a year would have been nice.

I can't believe we could have been saving $33 a month on our long distance calls with one of our providers but didn't know it. I plan to call all our providers every year, right after the April 15 tax deadline, to find out about current plan offerings and discounts. We could have saved money on our cell phone and cable bills if they were also with our long distance so I will definitely call around before renewing these services.