On Tue, 9 Dec 2014 22:09:14 +0000, "J. P. Gilliver (John)"
wrote:

In message , Char Jackson
writes:
On Mon, 08 Dec 2014 15:28:06 -0500, Wolf K wrote:

On 2014-12-08 12:33 PM, Ken Blake wrote:
On Mon, 8 Dec 2014 17:26:15 +0000 (UTC), Bert
wrote:

In news wrote:

That combination meets my needs and my wife's, and costs the grand
total of $80 a year, or $6.67 a month--much less than your $60 for the
land line + $30 for the cell phone.

It looks like you're not including the cost of your Internet service for
your VoIP phone.


True, but two points:

1. I would have the internet service even if I didn't have VoIP, so
it's not an extra cost occasioned by my having VoIP.

2. Even if you ignore my point #1 above and add in the $45 a month I
pay for the cable internet service, it comes to $61.67, still
substantially less than his $90.

Thanks for your advice, people, but this is _Canada_, where we have a
quasi-monopoly on cell phone service. Three major carriers, which don't
even share their networks properly.

For Canadian conditions, I'm paying at the low end of the scale, but I
am looking for better deals.

Here in the UK, the marketing is very dishonest: they usually put the
"plus line rental" in as small a print as they can get away with. In a
lot of locations (at least about 20%), you need a landline to get
internet, even if you never use it for 'phone calls.

I think I'm paying about 220 (pounds) a year for landline plus
broadband, with which I get free evening and weekend calls to other
landlines. Without continually messing about with short-term offers,
that's about the norm here; if I didn't want the free calls, I could
perhaps save about a fiver a month. (I should think about it, as I
hardly ever use it; I just like not having to worry about the cost when
I do.) If I lived in a more urban area with more companies' equipment in
my local exchange, I could do a _little_ better.

And I'm paying about £624 a year for much the same thing -- more if I exceed
the bandwidth cap.

I use VOIP (Skype) to talk to my daughter in Greece, otherwise I see no need
for it.


--
Steve Hayes from Tshwane, South Africa
Web: http://www.khanya.org.za/stevesig.htm
Blog: http://khanya.wordpress.com
E-mail - see web page, or parse: shayes at dunelm full stop org full stop uk