The sce­nario is clas­sic: you buy a mo­dem, get an In­ter­net sub­scrip­tion, surf for a month or more with­out a care, and then comes the France Télé­com bill with a to­tal amount span­ning at least 4 dig­its. The charm is then bro­ken and the con­clu­sion is ob­vi­ous: surf­ing is ex­pen­sive. Yet there must be a way to re­duce this bill while con­tin­u­ing to surf nor­mally. There are in­deed many ways to achieve this goal. Here are most of them.

Choosing your provider#

This seems ob­vi­ous, but it de­serves clar­i­fi­ca­tion for be­gin­ners in mo­dem telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions: you must choose your provider above all based on where it is lo­cated. To­day, most providers of­fer ac­cess points scat­tered through­out France. This ac­cess point is what you will call to con­nect to the In­ter­net, and the price of the call will de­pend on the dis­tance sep­a­rat­ing you from this point. So choose a provider that of­fers an ac­cess point in your lo­cal or ex­tended lo­cal area.

What is this area? A con­sul­ta­tion of the di­rec­tory will show you. If you call your provider out­side this area, chances are that the gi­gan­tic bill you re­ceived comes from there.

Some providers of­fer IP Kiosk. This is a ser­vice that al­lows you to call any­where in France for the price of a lo­cal call. The num­ber is the same for ev­ery­one. How­ever, be care­ful, only take this so­lu­tion as a last re­sort, in­deed, the IP Kiosk has sev­eral draw­backs: it is slow (ex­cept in ver­sion 2, avail­able only at cer­tain providers in­clud­ing Wanadoo), of­ten sat­u­rated (this will cost you sev­eral tele­phone units) and does not al­low you to ben­e­fit from cer­tain ad­van­tages (lo­cal pack­age, pri­mal­iste, tem­poralis).

Choosing your connection hours#

Sec­ond tech­nique to save sev­eral hun­dred French francs on the bill: choose your con­nec­tion hours. If you were con­nect­ing at any time, you can un­doubt­edly sig­nif­i­cantly re­duce your bill by fol­low­ing these tips. By call­ing dur­ing cer­tain time slots, you can ben­e­fit from sig­nif­i­cant re­ductions.

At red rate (or nor­mal), you pay one tele­phone unit (1 UT = FF 0.742 in­clud­ing VAT or FF 0.65 ex­clud­ing VAT) ev­ery 3 min­utes. At blue night rate, you pay one tele­phone unit ev­ery 9 min­utes, which is a 200% re­duc­tion! Here is the ta­ble sum­ma­riz­ing the dif­fer­ent time slots:

• $$$$ (Red): 1 UT ev­ery 3 minutes
• $$$ (White): 1 UT ev­ery 4 and a half minutes
• $$ (Blue): 1 UT ev­ery 6 minutes
• $ (Blue night): 1 UT ev­ery 9 minutes

In short, wait a lit­tle bit be­fore con­nect­ing, it can save you a few francs. Do long trans­fers ear­lier in the morn­ing or later in the evening, as the case may be.

Timing#

Now, you need to mon­i­tor each tele­phone unit. Any unit you start, you pay for. So you might as well con­sume it entirely.

Two so­lu­tions are avail­able to you: a watch, a pen­cil and a lit­tle pa­tience, or soft­ware that re­places all that. The goal is to time pre­cisely how long you have been con­nected since the re­mote mo­dem picked up. This way, you can fully en­joy the unit and avoid hang­ing up when a new unit has just started.

Ded­i­cated soft­ware like PTime or TarifCom is much more prac­ti­cal. They do all this au­to­mat­i­cally: cal­cu­late what you spent, track how long you stayed on­line, and warn you a few sec­onds be­fore the end of the unit. Set this warn­ing to around 25 sec­onds. This avoids hav­ing to abruptly cut the call or see­ing the next unit pass dur­ing a hard disk swap. You will be able to fully en­joy the unit and also plan your con­nec­tion ses­sions. You can es­ti­mate if you can af­ford to con­nect to­day. This helps avoid sur­prises when the bill arrives.

Local package, Primaliste, Temporalis#

Can we still save money? Yes! Get the lo­cal pack­age right now with­out hes­i­ta­tion, as long as you spend more than 6 hours on the phone af­ter 6 PM ev­ery month. For FF 30 per month, it of­fers you 6 free hours af­ter 6 PM. In other words, for 6 hours, you get the blue night rate af­ter 6 PM. Be care­ful how­ever: the pack­age ac­tu­ally cov­ers 12 hours ev­ery two months. You can spend all your pack­age dur­ing the first month. Also note that billing hap­pens al­most to the sec­ond. The min­i­mum unit is the minute, then the sec­ond. If you con­nect for 54 sec­onds, one minute gets de­ducted from the pack­age. If you con­nect for 1 minute and 16 sec­onds, that ex­act time gets deducted.

Now, you need to choose be­tween Pri­mal­iste and Tem­po­ralis. Pri­mal­iste of­fers 15% dis­count on 6 cho­sen num­bers and on calls of more than one minute. Tem­po­ralis of­fers a du­ra­tion-based dis­count. You can get up to 30% dis­count on a phone call last­ing more than 30 min­utes. These two of­fers are not cu­mu­la­tive. You need to choose the one that suits you best: Pri­mal­iste for fairly short calls, Tem­po­ralis if you stay on­line for a long time. Your FT agency should be able to tell you which ser­vice is most prof­itable by ex­am­in­ing your last bill.

These pro­mo­tions are not ap­pli­ca­ble to IP Kiosk—ex­cept the lo­cal package!

A matter of organization#

We have seen the best ways to save on an FT bill. There are oth­ers whose re­sults are more dif­fi­cult to as­sess. You can write down on a piece of pa­per ev­ery­thing you need to do once con­nected. Then only con­nect when the pa­per is full enough, dur­ing a fa­vor­able time slot.

You can also try to au­to­mate as many things as pos­si­ble. Launch sev­eral ser­vices au­to­mat­i­cally (email re­trieval, news, etc.). Use tools to cap­ture Web pages to view them off­line and save on­line time. Read and write news off­line. Do the same for mail. Also avoid IRC, as it costs a lot! 🙂 Launch mul­ti­ple browsers to take ad­van­tage of all the band­width. Save what in­ter­ests you to read it com­fort­ably once dis­con­nected. In short, automate!

And in the future?#

France Télé­com wants to de­velop telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions in France and make us love the year 2000. They de­cided to sim­plify the grid of time slots. Good news? No. The white rate, and es­pe­cially the blue night rate, will be elim­i­nated! Dur­ing the week, the blue rate will take ef­fect around 6 PM. In short, at night, the hour will go from FF 5 to FF 7 (ap­prox­i­mately). France Télé­com has promised to study an of­fer for In­ter­net users. Will we pay dou­ble what others pay?

At the start of the school year, we will also see the switch to per-sec­ond billing. Good news? Maybe. We have to see the con­di­tions and es­pe­cially the rates of­fered. One last thing: 1998 will be the year of dereg­u­la­tion of telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions in France. Com­pe­ti­tion will be able to pro­pose of­fers that can only be cheaper. How­ever, com­pa­nies will mainly ben­e­fit. We still have a long way to go to have free lo­cal calls (or at one unit, re­gard­less of du­ra­tion) as is done in the United States or Canada.