Phil Bernie Consulting

In Australia we are in the unfortunate situation where no matter where you are, you have to pay line rental for your landline phone. Then on top of that you have to pay for your phone calls. The catch was that even though I didn’t use my home phone for phone calls, I had no choice but to pay line rental because my ADSL connection relies on the phone line. Even more annoying is the fact that I have VoIP hooked up through PennyTel so even if I did use my home line, I wouldn’t be using the private carrier.

So, my monthly "Telecommuncations" bill looked like this:

• $49.95 for my internet connection through netspace (40gb Downloads)
• $29.95 line rental
• $5.00 per month contract with PennyTel (plus calls)

Which left me with a total bill of $84.90 and feeling like I wasn’t getting great value.

It was also a pain because there was 3 different bills and it was just generally a hassle.

For a while now, Australian ISP’s have been offering "Naked" ADSL plans which effectively allow you to have an ADSL connection through your phone line without paying line rental. It’s not quite how it works, because you do pay a premium for the "Naked" plans. Recently Netspace released their Naked ADSL plans and for me, it worked out being cheaper and better value than ADSL with line rental. I now just have a Netspace bill and a PennyTel bill which I like.

• $74.95 for ADSL through netspace (50gb downloads)
• $5.00 per month contract with PennyTel (plus calls)

I now have a total bill of $80 / month and it’s only a $5 / month saving, however I do get more downloads and I don’t feel like I’m paying for something I’m not even using.