There are ways to reduce the cost of having a mobile phone

Shop Around
Prices can vary quite a bit, and you may get a deal at a far better price from one dealer than another. In general, the High Street Multiple is not the cheapest, despite the economies of scale.

Wait!
Prices are falling. The technology involved is becoming cheaper to produce, and there is intense competition in the mobile phone market. Every month or two there is some new cheaper deal around. Usually the standard call tariffs stay much the same, but the range of pricing models may have one that suits you at an amazingly low cost, particularly if you mostly call at off-peak times.

Don't be rushed into buying. You have nothing to lose by taking a day or two to decide, and although the initial cost of a new phone seems low, it is a significant financial committment to get a contract phone, and a PAYG one may prove an expensive mistake.

Choose Your Tariff Wisely
There are some very good value tariffs available, particularly on One2one, but people don't always find the level of One2one service satisfactory. If Orange seems good enough for you, use their "Orange Value Promise" tariff matching to have Orange service at One2one prices.

If you make most of your calls after 7pm or at weekends, Orange's EveryDay 50 gives you 50 minutes of free calls (to other Orange or fixed line UK numbers) per day, with extra time charged at just 1p per minute. The charge for this is just 50p per day, but inclusive call time you don't use each day is lost. There is no carry-over to the next day.

If you expect to make very few calls, consider either Orange's JustTalk or Virgin Mobile. These two have no monthly line rental. The former has cheaper off-peak call charges and wider coverage, but Virgin offers lower peak-time charges (there is no peak or off-peak on Virgin), free voicemail, and can be prepay (PAYG) or paid by monthly direct debit in arrears. You can also make (but not receive) fax and data calls. Virgin charge for voice calls to 0800 numbers, but the (rather better) Orange price-match of that tariff does not - at present!

Pre-pay and save!
There are two sorts of pre-pay, and they are available from all the networks by differing names:

• Buy the handset, connection and a year's line rental by paying up front. If you already have a handset, you can get an ever cheaper deal. Apart from the paying in advance, you get a standard contract, but it tends to be quite a bit cheaper. For instance, Orange's Boxed and Ready gives you Talk15 for a year, complete with a Motorola handset, and if you shop around, you can get it for £40 at the time of writing. The RRP is rather more, of course, but it's still a very good deal. Orange replaced this offer with handsets bundled with a year of EveryDay 10, which gives 10 minutes of off-peak calls each day, but high peak-time call charges. Not such a good deal, in my view, but it may suit you..

• Buy vouchers to pre-pay talk time, and top-up when they run low. These tend to have high per-minute call costs, but if you don't make many outgoing calls, they can be exceptional value for money. Even if your voucher has expired, you can still receive incoming calls and make emergency calls, though keeping some credit on the account makes sense. Orange JT are available with or without handsets, but the bundled handsets tend to be old, inferior models. Virgin sell the "Connection Pack" separately from the handset. Their handsets seem expensive, because there is no subsidy, but the selection available includes good ones. You can use One2one handsets instead, though! Note that if you top up an Orange JT with £50 voucher, the call charges drop significantly, and they stay low eve if you later top up with smaller amounts, as long as the balance never falls to zero.

These deals are the networks trying to appeal to Joe Public, and much of the new subscribers are on these deals. The latter sort don't even require a credit check, because you pay before using the phone!

Make the subsidy work for you!
The subsidy system can be made to work less to the customer's disadvantage, as long as you are as sharp as the system!

I bought a secondhand GSM900 phone, not connected, and then for a total of around £55 I originally got a sim card, connection fee and a year's line rental including 15 minutes of calls per month (now 20 minutes) on the Vodafone low-call digital tariff through. Similar deals are still available, but the prices varies from month to month.

There are several companies offering such deals. I have listed some on the SIM-Only dealers page, but this list may be complete or inaccurate. Please let me know about the firms listed!

The reason that these cheap contracts are possible is that the money that would have subsidised the phone subsidises the line rental instead!

The drawback is that after a year, the contract ends, and I had to cancel and start again, with a new contract (£35 on Cellnet last time: the price varies and can be up to £100, and watch out for additional itemised billing charges. I chose not to have bills itemised) and a new phone number. The inconvenience of this is partly eliminated by using a Personal Number.

Don't automatically assume that a Sim Only is the best value for you, however. When mine expired, it was replaced with a handset I had, using a B&R sim card, and is now on Orange's equivalent of the Virgin tariff.

Add 10,000 miles to the distance -- save call charges!
Bizarre, but true! If you open a call-back account, you can make calls more cheaply by routing them via the USA. You open an account giving your credit card details, and your (mobile) phone number. To make a call, you ring the trigger number (usually in the USA, but some companies offer UK numbers if you can't make international calls) but the number you call doesn't answer. You hang up and the switchboard in the USA rings you back on your mobile. You answer the call, and have a US dialling tone. You can ring any number in the world (including the UK).

You pay for both legs of the call, but the charges are fairly low. For example, ringing a UK number from the UK will cost about 5 to 8p/minute to go UK to US, plus the same amount to come back. Total of 10p to 16p/minute, cheaper than many domestic mobile call charges! International calls are also competitive. You can use this with any mobile phone (or fixed phone, if you want) but you have to register the number first.

I haven't tried this system myself, but plenty of people find it useful. Callnow at http://www.callnow.com are one firm offering this service I'd be interested to hear what people think of the service. It does seem a lot of messing about. If you have an Orange or One2one phone, there is an easier and cheaper alternative, though. Read on...

Affordable call charges on Orange and One2one
There are companies that offer long-distance and international phone calls at cheaper rates than BT. Personally, I use AXS and OneTel .These also offer 0800 number access and allow you to make these cheaper calls from any number, not just your home or office number.

Because Orange and One2one don't charge for 0800 numbers (not free on One2one pay-as-you-go or Orange JustTalk, though), you can use these services to make calls from your mobile phone. You dial the access number, then when connected, you get a second dial tone, from which you can make your call at the cheap rate. This means that you can't use it for fax or data calls from a mobile, because there's no way to DTMF send tones to the secondary dial tone.

The savings are considerable: A call on Orange can be as much as 40p/minute peak but using First Telecom the charges are 5p/minute peak, 3p/minute off-peak and 2.5p/minute at weekends (8pm Fri - 8am Mon). Calls to the USA are 8.5p/minute at all times. All prices are plus VAT, unfortunately.

AXS are even cheaper, with UK calls at 2p per minute, and calls to the USA at 4p per minute, all including VAT. AXS are worth using for calls from fixed-line phones too, of course.

Orange and One2one do not approve of third party carriers, for obvious reasons. They made the First Telecom access numbers chargeable, even the geographic ones that should be free local calls. Complaints to OFTEL got nowhere, which tells you more about OFTEL than about the equity of Orange and One2one's action (but that's another story). First Telecom just created a new number, and stated that they will do so again and again if Orange block their new numbers. So far, that's just what they have done. One2one is similar (but don't mention one2one to FT - tell them your Orange number is 07956. or whatever).

It is not possible to make a data call from a mobile phone using First Telecom or AXS but there is a cheaper alternative for internet access anyway. See the Data page for details of 0800/0808-access "free" (no subscription) ISPs at very competitive per-minute rates.

Beware if you are an Orange or One2one customer: One2one seem to have started charging 6p per minute for data calls to 0800 numbers, though many one2one uses have no recollection of being advised of this change in the tariff.
Orange plan to charge full national rate (or use inclusive minutes) for data calls to 0800 numbers from January 2001, but at 10 Dec 2000 they were still telling customers that these calls are free. A complete breach of trust with their customers, in my view. This charge increase is sufficent to allow you to cancel a contract early without penalty, and keep the subsidised handset.

If you are interested in FT, these are the details you need: With First Telecom you prepay using your credit card, then each time you make a call, a recorded voice tells you what credit you have left. There is a 3p minimum call charge, and calls are charged in 15 second chunks. If you start out with a £10 credit, remember that your credit card will be debited with £11.75 because of the added VAT.

You can use more or less any phone to call FT, but if you use a BT payphone (one in the street - normally in-building ones are privately-owned) you pay an extra 15p per minute. Still cheaper than a BT calling card, but a less good deal!

AXS is essentially similar, but they also give the choice between paying in advance or monthly in arrears by Direct Debit, but you have to make your preference clear when signing up.

When you first join, you have to enter your account number and PIN code, but if you "register" your phone number(s) with the carrier, calls from those number don't need account or pin numbers.

How to say thank you for this information - FT
If you sign up with First Telecom, and quote my reference number, I get a small recruitment bonus.
Phone 0800 458 0055 to speak to First Telecom, and please remember to quote reference 1044087. If you don't quote the number, the bonus is lost!

How to be a personal friend - AXS
If you sign up with AXS, you have to be a personal friend of mine for me to get a £5 bonus, but you get one as well!. "Good day. Nice to meet you. I do like to make new friends." ;-)
Phone 0800 954 2223 to speak to AXS, and when you fill in the application form (which they will send you), please remember to quote reference 29727. That gets you a £5 bonus as well as your personal friend, Iain Harrison! Please note that it is increasingly hard to get new access numbers for AXS when Orange bar them, but they remain a good deal for one2one users.

One More - OneTel
OneTel (http://www.onetel.co.uk) also offer reasonably competitive rates, but have sneaked in a 3p connection charge on top of the call charges, and have not made that increase plain to their customers.

There are other companies offering much the same thing, and you can find quite a few to choose from, though not many are as good value as AXS.

©2000 Iain Harrison, Hairydog Productions

  Comments, suggestions and amendments welcomed!

cellular. v1.70 12 Nov 00