I've been on a mobile phone contract for a number of years. Both, for my wife and I, we would pay anywhere between 30 and 50 pounds a month. The attraction of course was the option of being able to own a spanking new handset at the beginning of the next contract.
Times have been hard and like many others, we have been looking to tighten our belts. Each family is different and phone usage is different. In our case, we found that we called Sri Lanka often, spoke to family in New Zealand and Australia and locally, we would call landlines a lot. About a year ago when my last contract with Orange ran out, I opted for a SIM only contract with them which gave me 300 minutes and unlimited calls to landlines for £ 15 a month. The downside to these kind of contracts was that when the 300 minutes exceeded, you were charged a packet. I am also a Cable customer and use Virgin Media for Phone, broadband and digital TV services. I was probably spending well over £ 60 a month for Virgin Media's Talk 800 and their basic TV package and broadband.
To make a long story short, I wanted cut down my phone bill by at least £ 30 and the way I went about it is this:
I purchased a cheap unlocked hand set for £ 20 (it would have cost £ 20 to get my existing phones unlocked), cancelled my contract with orange and asked for the PAC code (you will need this if you want to keep your existing number), signed up with Giff Gaff (runs on the O2 network) which provides excellent PAYG rates and also provides free Giff Gaff to Giff Gaff calls. My wife and I use the same network.
I then downgraded my Cable service to Talk Weekends and now the phone, TV and broadband bundle comes to £ 23. In place of this, I signed up with skype and 2 subscriptions, the first of which offered unlimited calls to land lines within the UK, US and Australia and New Zealand for £ 9.19 and 120 minutes to Sri Lanka for £ 8.04. Skype calls to Sri Lanka is not the cheapest. You can get a better deal with chillitalk. For a £ 10 top-up, you get 200 minutes plus and additional 200 minutes free to use during the weekends.
I've included some useful links in this post for you to see if you can cut down on the overall cost of your calls:
www.chillitalk.co.uk
https://giffgaff.com/orders/affiliate/thatsminedad
www.skype.com
Times have been hard and like many others, we have been looking to tighten our belts. Each family is different and phone usage is different. In our case, we found that we called Sri Lanka often, spoke to family in New Zealand and Australia and locally, we would call landlines a lot. About a year ago when my last contract with Orange ran out, I opted for a SIM only contract with them which gave me 300 minutes and unlimited calls to landlines for £ 15 a month. The downside to these kind of contracts was that when the 300 minutes exceeded, you were charged a packet. I am also a Cable customer and use Virgin Media for Phone, broadband and digital TV services. I was probably spending well over £ 60 a month for Virgin Media's Talk 800 and their basic TV package and broadband.
To make a long story short, I wanted cut down my phone bill by at least £ 30 and the way I went about it is this:
I purchased a cheap unlocked hand set for £ 20 (it would have cost £ 20 to get my existing phones unlocked), cancelled my contract with orange and asked for the PAC code (you will need this if you want to keep your existing number), signed up with Giff Gaff (runs on the O2 network) which provides excellent PAYG rates and also provides free Giff Gaff to Giff Gaff calls. My wife and I use the same network.
I then downgraded my Cable service to Talk Weekends and now the phone, TV and broadband bundle comes to £ 23. In place of this, I signed up with skype and 2 subscriptions, the first of which offered unlimited calls to land lines within the UK, US and Australia and New Zealand for £ 9.19 and 120 minutes to Sri Lanka for £ 8.04. Skype calls to Sri Lanka is not the cheapest. You can get a better deal with chillitalk. For a £ 10 top-up, you get 200 minutes plus and additional 200 minutes free to use during the weekends.
I've included some useful links in this post for you to see if you can cut down on the overall cost of your calls:
www.chillitalk.co.uk
https://giffgaff.com/orders/affiliate/thatsminedad
www.skype.com
