A sinking feeling, anger, frustration — all typical reactions to a phone bill.
For the cost-conscious college student, the once-a- month phone bill can wreak havoc on an already stressed bank account.
All the countless gimmicks phone companies use to bombard consumers make it all the more confusing for people to determine the most cost-savvy carrier or calling plan.
Ami Okasinski, a senior biology major, said she has the answer to such woes. She started passing out flyers on campus Monday that boldly accuse BellSouth of ripping consumers off. The flyer states that the Telecommunications Research and Action Center, an independent nonprofit watchdog group for telecommunications customers, touts smaller carriers as cheaper than the three largest long-distance providers — AT&T, Sprint and MCI WorldCom.
TRAC did release a study March 29, 2001, that came to that conclusion.
“The TRAC study shows that the least expensive plans continue to be offered by the smaller carriers, such as Matrix, Excel and Frontier,” said the report. “For example, the lowest comparable plan for AT&T is $26.30, for MCI it is $25.32 and for Sprint it is $30.68. You can save $91.92 to $156.24 a year by selecting the lowest rate plan and carrier.”
Of course, Okasinski would like you to choose a smaller carrier. Specifically Excel, the company she works for. She gets a percentage of the money from bills of the people that sign up with her for Excel service. Hence the flyers on campus.
“Whether people go with Excel or not, they still need to know what they’re paying for,” she said. “That’s another reason I’m doing this.”
Kate Dean, staff associate at TRAC, said that even though smaller carriers can sometimes have cheaper plans, they aren’t always the best choice.
She said the most sure-fire way to save money on phone bills is to choose the most appropriate plan for your calling needs. In essence, figure out when you use the phone most and pick out a plan that caters to that time frame.
One way TRAC helps people determine what they need is by providing a current comparison chart of all phone plans on their Web site, at www.trac.org. Web surfers can also go to the Web site and plug in information from their last three phone bills and their ideal phone plans will be electronically computed.
“Most people don’t know their options, so they stick with what they’ve got,” said Dean. “The quality is not the difference between the carriers — big, medium or small. When you get down to it, you can still call your aunt in California.”
