Good stuff. However, whether these plans save you money does depend on how many calls you make, of both the local and domestic LD variety, and their respective durations.

For decades, and especially the DialUp Era of the Internet, flat rate local dialing has been a fixture on my line. With the advent of Broadband, it now pays to examine how many local calls you really make.

I went through this analysis

http://www.petrovic.org/blog/2006/08/24/more-residential-measured-rate-savings/

and have saved $14 over the last two months by migrating to measured service for local calling. My total local bill is about $21, which includes the long list of taxes and surcharges.

Flat rate plans are popular not just because you pay one price for all you can eat. They are also popular because they dramatically reduce the mental transaction costs represented by the purchase of a great number of low priced items. Namely, cheap phone calls. The catch is that many of us make *far fewer* local calls than we realize (not that this class of calls has ever been itemized on our montly bill, as LD calls are), and hence are willing to pay flat rate premiums to simply make that multi-transaction billing problem go away. In other words, I will pay a premium to avoid the chore of checking my monthly bill for local calling correctness.

But I went through the trouble of tracking my calls, and I shaved $7 off my local call plan as a result. In the dollar figures we’re talking here, that’s real money. None of the annual IP voice plans are yet competive with sticking with my local telco on a measured rate plan.

As for long distance calls and how they impact the monthly local bill: I make LD calls either through an IP termination process (Voxee), or just use my mobile minutes, which do not distinguish between local and LD. And, importantly, by finding a way to save money with my existing telco provider, I stick with the devil I know vs. the one I don’t with respect to billing and service continuity.

Mark