How it works
The callcosts.ie website provides you with a comparison of the cost of home phone price plans available in the market. It provides a cost comparison based on the details you enter regarding your home phone usage. It is an indicative tool that may assist you in choosing a particular price plan, either with your existing provider, or indeed, with a new service provider.
When entering details regarding your usage of home phone services, consider what represents a typical monthly usage pattern. Think about when you make your calls. It may also be useful to enter varied usage details for months when your usage changes (e.g. when on holidays). When choosing an operator you may also wish to consider factors other than price that may be important to you such as customer service, product range and billing/payment options. There are four simple steps to complete.
- Step 1: Enter home phone usage details
- Step 2: Enter more details usage (optional)
- Step 3: Get results
- Step 4: View the price plan
Step 1: Enter home phone usage details
This is the first step on the home phone calculator. For your domestic call usage you are asked to enter when you make most calls and how many minutes you use for local, national and mobile calls.
For international call usage you are again asked to indicate when you make most calls. The reason this question is asked twice is because many peoples international calling pattern can be different to their domestic calling pattern. You can then select up to three destinations from a list of popular countries.
Once you have entered this information, you can choose to 'Get Results Now' or you can 'Enter More Detailed Usage' and refine your specific usage details. Please note, before doing so you should read the model assumptions and the terms and conditions governing the use of the website as you will be asked to indicate that you understand and fully accept them before moving to the next screen.
Step 2: Enter more details usage (optional)
This is the second step on the home phone calculator (which is optional). Here you can see more detail as to how callcosts.ie uses the model assumptions along with the details you supplied in Step 1 to generate a cost comparison. For example, the minutes you entered are distributed
- across peak, off peak and weekend timeframes for all call types, and
- across the different mobile networks, based on the market share for mobile operators.
Please note that you can change the information on this screen. For example, if you consider that you use more of your minutes at a particular time of day and/or call people on one network more frequently than people on other networks.
One other consideration on this screen relates to 'same network' rates. A number of operators offer free or reduced rates if the person you are calling is also one of their customers. In callcosts you can indicate if the people you call are predominantly with one operator. If you select yes you will be asked to indicate who that operator is and what percentage of your minutes are to people with this operator.
Step 3: Get results
This is the third step on the home phone calculator. However, you can also go here directly after completing Step 1 by choosing 'Get Results Now'. Step 3 provides you with a list of home phone price plans ranked according to their cost in light of the usage details you entered. If you wish you can re-sort this information, for example, by service provider name or based on whether the operator offers a single bill.
The results screen also provides a list of non price 'Plan Features' that may be of interest to you. Such features include customer service hours as well as payment and billing options. If you want to look at the specific details on any of the tariffs featured in the results screen you can do this by clicking on the particular tariff name.