southern california telephone answering service

The burgeoning growth of the long-distance industry is confounding Americans searching for the biggest bang for their bucks. Here is what consumers now should know. When Linda Ross began looking for less-expensive telephone service, she quickly learned to ask questions.

We had to get another line for my daughter and, for the first month, they were charging us these terrible, terrible rates, she says. We had to call and ask them before they brought the phone rates down from something like $2 a minute.

Ross, who since has written The Smart Consumers Book of Questions, says that simply asking made all the difference. If you want to save money on long-distance phone service, Ross strategy makes good sense.

Since the governments breakup of AT&T in the early 1980s, inflation-adjusted per minute rates for state-to-state long-distance calls have fallen by nearly 90 percent while call volume has increased 800 percent. Explosive growth in the number of phone-service providers, however, has not made things any easier for consumers.

Some of the reduction in long-distance rates is certainly a result of falling prices, but some of it has to do with a change in national laws, says Robert Self, author of the book Long Distance for Less and publisher of several newsletters on long-distance telephone service. They used to use long-distance charges to subsidize local service and now thats a much smaller factor.

Although technology has allowed panies to trim personnel even as call volume surged, reductions in access rates have made the most difference. Shortly after deregulation in the early 1980s, the access fees that long-distance carriers paid for the use of local telephone systems could run as high as 17 or 18 cents a minute.

Today, they stand at about 4 cents per minute and may drop even lower. A new universal-service charge of $3.50 a month adds a fee to everyones telephone bill to provide Internet access to schools and better phone systems in isolated areas.

As a result, local phone rates have increased significantly since the early 1980s. During the same period, lower long-distance rates have encouraged people to call long distance more often.

Overall, phone bills in inflation-adjusted terms have remained about the same. The universe petitive choices, however, allows those who shop well to save money.

Generally, the best way to get cheaper long-distance service is to haggle with your current provider. There arent massive savings from having people switch from long-distance provider to long-distance provider, says Vic Rounder, chief executive officer of Expense Reduction Consulting, based in Boca Raton, Fla.

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