Getting shock from your phone bill.
After few years of price war, telecom companies are becoming more revenue conscious. The old days of freebies are over. There has been regular increase in tariff in the last year. Unfortunately, this is the bad news for consumers, who had made a killing from these price wars. This regular rise in their cellphone bill is leading to rise in their communication cost in an already inflationary situation.
Good news is that with a smart use of Technology, you can reduce this heartburn and your telecom cost. You and your cellphone friend circle need to adopt a little change in your cellphone usage habits. Here are few tips to reduce your mobile bills
Use Smart messengers (If you have Wi-Fi or GPRS)
With this cellphone monster, we got the unavoidable habit of SMS to our friends and colleagues. The bad part is that it cost money! The international SMS are even costlier. For sending files and videos you need to subscribe to MMS services which further cost money. Each little thing you do will cost money. Time to get a smartphone and enable GPRS or take a Wi-Fi ( you may be having it already for internet connectivity) and use smart messengers like whatsapp, IM, Window live messenger, or even facebook messenger or many alike ones as you get the below benefits
- Free of cost SMS – The SMS sent through these messengers is free and instant. Even for international SMS which cost more money they are delivered instantly free of cost.
- Chat Group : Unlike the normal messenger , they also facilitates creation of chat groups which can be used for group sms.
- Wide range of users – Some of the messengers offer cross usage e.g. users of those messengers can send free sms to other users. This increase in wide coverage of people getting messages to you.
- Sending videos and pictures over messages with no extra cost – This is another beauty. You can send pictures, videos or other files over these messengers. These messengers work very well with photos and videos and directly transport these photos and videos to you gallery.
But you need to make sure that you have GPRS connection or wifi and a smartphone to use them. Smartphones are becoming very economical these days. Some smartphones have started costing even less than $80. Also, your GPRS connection should have adequate data bandwidth plan otherwise sending heavy files can cost you through your GPRS connection. But a low cost data plan is available for as low at even $2 in various countries . If you have an unlimited plan, then nothing like it. Have party and fun and send messages to the whole town using those messengers at your convenience!
Use Calling apps for making calls (If you have Wi-Fi or GPRS) : – There are free calling apps which will use your Wi-Fi or 3G connection to connect you through voice or video calls to other person using the same app. Mentioning a few of them
- Skype: - Skype does not need any introduction. But still lot of people do not use it. Through your wifi or GPRS connection you can connect free to another user using skype. You can also make a call from Skype to a mobile number but you need to pay some fee as per the telecom rules but these calls may be cheaper. But it does take lot of bandwidth so you must have an adequate data bandwidth plan.
- Tangoo : – Another video , voice app which has a good number of users who can make free voice and video calls through this app.
- Viber : This also allows free calls and texting to all users over viber network.
There are similar various other apps which can give free calling facility on the lines of Skype etc. Users can use any app of their choice which is widely used.
With the internet bandwidth cost expected to stay within limits, it is possible that more and more users will shift to these voice and text messages based apps. If governments try hard to make Wi-Fi availability free at all public locations like bus stands, railway stations and airports and tax and other government offices. It could lead to another big communication revolution in the world.