Get the Best Landline Deals

As well as cheaper home phone call costs, switching away from BT can also get you cheaper line rental on your landline.

When choosing a new home phone provider, you have the choice of getting an all-in-one bundled package that covers your line rental and calls, using a prefix dialling service or sticking with BT for your landline but taking your calls from another provider.

Your home phone needs

In order to determine which tariff is the cheapest, you need to think about the way that you use your home phone. Will you need an anytime tariff to cover daytime landline calls; an add-on for calls to mobiles; or a package that offers free calls abroad?

You can use an online comparison website such as HomePhoneChoices.co.uk to compare deals across the market – though not every package will be available.

Home phone providers

Switching away from BT can save you over £100 a year in cheaper line rental and home phone calls.

BT currently charges £11.25 a month for a landline connection, but you can cut this to just £9.75 a month by switching to Madasafish. Its basic package also comes with free evening and weekend calls, and free anytime calls to other Madasafish users.

Other home phone providers such as Primus Saver, YourCalls and First Telecom also offer cut-price landline and mobile calls as well as line rental for just £9.99, £10.03 and £10.61 a month respectively.

Prefix dialling services

Prefix dialling services offer cheap calls to mobiles and foreign countries by re-routing your calls via their own network. You simply dial the prefix number before calling abroad, for example, and instead of going via BT your call will simply be charge to the prefix service provider at a much cheaper rate.

However, different prefix dialling services offer different rates for different calling destinations – you might pay just 1ppm with one supplier and 3ppm with another – so it pays to shop around for the best deal. And if you regularly call more than one destination it might even be worth using two different companies.

Internet telephony

If you have a home broadband connection and don’t want to use your landline connection for calls then you could also try internet telephony, or VoIP.

Using a VoIP provider you can use the internet to make calls from your computer to other computers and even landlines across the world. Suppliers like Skype allow you to make very cheap calls from your PC and you can even connect for free to other Skype users.

Alternatively, you could try a supplier like Vonage, which offers packages from £5.99 a month and which allows you to continue using a traditional handset to make and receive calls - you’ll also get a residential number that people can call you on.

If you have an ADSL connection you’ll have to keep paying for your landline rental, but if you're a Virgin Media cable customer you could ditch your landline all together and just use a VoIP provider for your calls – saving you £135 a year compared to BT.

For more information, visit the website of the telecommunications regulator, Ofcom.