I periodically get billing questions from younger people who have cell phones, but who have never seen a regular landline phone bill. They’re usually wondering why their landline phone bill doesn’t have all of their calls on it.

The big difference between cell phone bills and landline phone bills, is that all incoming and outgoing calls on a cell phone are logged, because those minutes count against your bill, while only outgoing calls on a landline bill are logged, because they are charging you a per minute rate, and you need to see what you’re paying for. In other words, both bills only show you the stuff that affects how much your bill is.

Since most people who have a landline phone service pay a flat rate for all for their local calls per month, none of the incoming and outgoing local calls are included on your bill. The same holds true for long distance phone service, since you don’t get charged for incoming long distance calls, they don’t show up on your bill. So, the only calls that are listed on your monthly landline, or long distance phone bill, are the ones that you have made to someone else.

When viewing a long distance phone bill, and you have more than one phone number, the outgoing long distance calls will be listed by the number that made the call, and will include the time the call was made, how long the call lasted, and how much you were changed for the call. Then, after all the calls are listed for that phone number, there will be a subtotal for that phone number. The same will be true for any toll free numbers you may have, since you have to pay for any calls people made to your toll free numbers too.

Finally, on a landline phone bill, just as on a cell phone bill, there will be a page full of local, city, county, state and federal taxes and fees. Most of these taxes and fees are based on a percentage of your total bill, and then, just for “sh*ts and giggles”, your phone company will stick in a recovery fee, or two, and anything else they think they can get away with.

Since most people’s landline phone bills include taxes and fees that can add up to more than the actual phone usage, tons of people are switching their homes and businesses to VoIP. VoIP is becoming so popular, because you can get unlimited local and long distance phone service for less than $20.00 per month, and the total taxes and fees are usually less than $3.00 per month. And, what’s really funny, is that most people are now using VoIP under the guise of “Digital Phone Service”, not knowing that digital phone service is just another name VoIP phone service, internet phone service, voice over IP phone service, broadband phone service and others.

If you want to save some money, order your phone service from Phonepower for less than $20.00 per month and quit giving your money to the big landline phone companies.