More than 17m people have changed gas or electricity suppliers since these services were opened for competition. If you work from home, it's a good time to do the same for your telecoms spending.
At the moment, it is easier to use third-party telephone companies if you stick with BT for your line rental, although this looks set to change soon. For now, if you use a non-BT phone line, you will usually have to use annoyingly long access codes to access other firms.
With a BT line, you can use other suppliers through short four-figure access codes, by attaching a box to the phone line, or through Carrier Pre-Selection, under which you use an alternative to BT for some or all types of calls.
If you use one of BT's Together packages - and a majority of customers do - you pay 4p a minute for long-distance daytime calls, 3p for local daytime calls, 2p for long-distance evening and weekend (off-peak) calls and 1p for local off-peak. You get a further 10% off 10 nominated "Friends & Family" domestic numbers, and 20% off one. All charged calls cost at least 5p.
Some telecoms rivals claim huge savings against BT's standard rates (www.serviceview.bt.com/list), but these only apply if you don't use BT Together. Standard national rates are 7.91p for long-distance daytime, 3.95p evenings, 2p weekends. These rates also apply to 0870 numbers, regardless of the BT package used. The standard local rates, which also apply to 0845 calls, are 3.95p a minute peak, 1.49p evenings and 1p weekends.
However, rival companies can often beat both standard and Together rates. Comparison site Uswitch (www.uswitch.com) is a good place to start.
If you spend a lot on peak-time calls to land lines, Tiscali looks a good bet. One of the Italian-based internet services provider's (ISP) telephone services, SmartTalk Daytime Extra (www.tiscali.co.uk/services/smarttalk/daytime_extra.html), charges just 2p a minute for local daytime calls and for national calls at any time, 1.5p for local evening calls and a penny for local weekend calls. There is no standing charge: you just set up a card payment, and pay for what you use. This is true for all the phone services mentioned here. If you aren't happy with them, you just stop using them.
There are a few disadvantages. Tiscali charges by the minute, rather than by the second as with BT and others, and rounds up call costs to the nearest penny; its definition of local is just the numbers within your area code, whereas BT includes surrounding areas; and the inquiries line is an 0870 number.
OneTel (www.onetel.co.uk) charges 2.5p a minute for all daytime calls. It may be of most interest for its unlimited use off-peak package, which costs £4.99 a month: if combined with BT's basic line rental, this comes to £14.49. This is similar to BT's unlimited UK calls option, which totals £18.50 a month.
All these deals apply only to "geographic" numbers, where the code starts 01 or 02. It is very difficult to find discounts on BT's rates for 0845 and 0870 numbers, which are not covered by "unlimited" packages, either. Some rivals, including OneTel, actually charge more than BT for 0845 and 0870 calls.
It is similarly hard to find cheap rates for UK mobiles. Texan telecoms company Vartec (www.vartec.co.uk) has a reasonable discount during the day, of 16p a minute during peak times (BT's Together package charges from 18p to 21.5p, depending on the network called, and not including a Friends and Family discount). However, it charges 12p in the evening (9.7p to 16.1p from BT) and 4p at weekends (2.2p to 6p from BT - the lowest rate is for calls to O2).
Also, Vartec charges a three-minute minimum, unless your call lasts less than five seconds, in which case it charges 5p. It also has a bargain 0.9p rate for weekend calls to geographic numbers: however, in this case there is a 10p minimum.
Alternatively, use your mobile. Several networks have new tariffs where calls to any mobile are included in your airtime. And most tariffs include calls made to a mobile on the same network as yours.
An area that just got much more competitive, and confusing, is directory inquiries. Dialling 192 will stop working in August: you will need to dial a six-figure number starting with 118, with BT's service on 118500.
Dublin-based call centre firm Conduit recently opened such a service at 20p a minute, half the BT price, on 118888. However, BT undercuts itself by 100% online. Go to www.bt.com, click on the "Directory Enquires" link in the "BT Popular Destinations" list at top-right of the page, and you can search free for 10 numbers a day, plus 200 more per month if you register. They may save you paying for directory inquiries, but ISPs are well worth reviewing, as the prices vary widely.
For pay-as-you-use services, the price per minute is usually the cost of an 0845 call. But some ISPs offer discounted 0845 rates if you also use their phone service; Tiscali (see above) charges 1p a minute at all times. Or you might want to choose an ISP with a free support line, such as Waitrose (www.waitrose.com). By contrast, Virgin Net charges £1 a minute for support calls.
If you pay a fixed amount each month and use a freephone number to connect to an "unlimited" service, you may be paying more than you signed up for.
Freeserve, the UK's largest ISP, has just increased its monthly unlimited fee to £14.99: it was £12.99 at the start of last year. BT Openworld recently increased its charge to £15.99, and changed its terms so that you are limited to 150 hours each month.
However, if you live in an area covered by NTL's cable system (www.ntlhome.com), you can get a 128 kilobit-per-second connection, about three times as fast as dial-up, for £14.99 a month, although the company charges £25 set-up fee.
If you are happy to stick with dial-up, Plus Net (www.plus.net) charges £8.99 a month for up to 20 hours' access a week. The website www.ispreview.co.uk has reviews of hundreds of ISPs to help you choose.
You may find it difficult to move if you have given customers an ISP-linked email address (such as, you@freeserve.co.uk or you@btopenworld.com). Bear in mind that even if you stop paying the monthly fees, most ISPs will keep your account open for pay-as-you-go access, as long as you use their 0845 pay-as-you-use service periodically.
You can bypass this problem in future by buying your own domain name, so you can redirect email and website traffic if you move ISP.
Low Cost Names (www.lcn.biz) charges £8.81 for two years' use of a .co.uk name. It only allows a single email forwarding address per domain, but the website forwarding is advert-free.
Note all prices in this article include VAT
How to save 30% on your bills
For example, let's say that you use BT's Together telephone service and its ISP, BT Openworld. How much could you save by moving your voice and internet calls?
If each month you make 10 hours of national peak-time phone calls, and two hours of mobile peak-time calls to Vodafone mobiles, your spending with BT would be £11.50 for line rental, minus £2.40 for using its call allowance, plus £24 for land-line calls and £23.92 for mobile calls. Assuming half were to Friends and Family numbers, getting a 10% discount, you would spend £655.49 a year.
If you moved all calls away from BT, you could pay the straight line rental of £9.50. Even then, you may as well use the BT service a little: even with the basic rental, you get £1.80 of free calls each month (not included in this calculation).
Making the same land-line calls through Tiscali would cost £12 a month, and diverting the mobile calls through Vartec would come to £19.20. This would cost you £488.40, producing a possible saving of £167.09. However, both firms round up call times, which means you will pay a few pounds more.
For ISPs, BT Openworld charges £191.88 a year for its 150 hours-a-month maximum internet service. If you decided to move to Plus Net's cheapest service, you would get 20 hours-a-week maximum: not as much as Openworld, but enough for many home workers. This would cost £107.88, saving £84.
Together, these measures could cut your annual spending from £847.37 to £596.28, a saving of £251.09. You could splash £8.81 of this on your own domain name, to make changing your ISP an easier task - and you only need to pay that every other year.
