Do you feel you are paying too much for your phone bill? On your regular phone bill, of course it is very convenient that you can make unlimited local calls. However, I was using a land line to make a 5-minute long distance call and when I checked the bill (which came a month later) I found out that this little call cost over 3 dollars. You are probably so used to it that you do not even notice. But isn't this a bit too expensive?

With the tip a friend of mine that I got around 8 years ago, I was calling Central European cell phones for a 22 cents a minute and US long distance cost me about 6 cents.

Therefore I decided to look around a bit and see how much I should pay for calls and why it is so expensive. One thing that I found was that regular long distance providers spend up to 1/3 of your phone bill for collections and bad-debt retrieval, on people who do not pay their bills. When you pay your phone bill, every month you are paying for someone else's phone bill. On a system where everyone pays in advance, this money can be spent directly to decrease the costs of your phone calls.

I also found that the use of the internet by phone companies made a difference. Basically, to call from the U.S. to Europe, you need to make a local call to connect to their system, then your call travels through the internet to Europe, which is on an inexpensive contract, then in Europe it is another local call from their system to the receiving phone number. So it is two local phone calls plus the small internet fee instead of one expensive long distance call. In the beginning the quality of these phones was not that good, but with the advance of the technology that seems to be handled now.

So I started to look around to see how I could considerably cut down my phone expenses. There are thousands of companies...