Subscriptions & services

Posted on 3 Sep 2008 at 11:34

Local SIMs can reduce calls costing £2 per minute to mere pence, saving £50 to £100 on even a short trip.

Join a free ISP

Although a reliable broadband connection might be the last thing you want to sacrifice, there are undoubtedly savings to be made if you're prepared to take a gamble. Sky TV customers, for example, can get a free 2Mb/sec connection with a 2GB monthly download cap, or pay only £5 per month for a much less constricting 8Mb/sec connection with a plentiful 40GB cap. Sky won a respectable three stars in our 2007 broadband awards and, not surprisingly, came out top for value for money.

The rather more infamous TalkTalk throws in an 8Mb/sec broadband connection with a £13.75 per month phone deal (£16.99 after the first three months). It scored a rather less impressive two stars in our broadband survey, and scored just one for reliability, perhaps making that a compromise too far.
£216 per year, by using Sky's "free" broadband compared to the cheapest package from our award-winning ISP, Zen.

Free online backup

Maintaining an offsite backup is essential, but online backup services that charge by the MB or GB of storage can easily run up costly bills. If you've got tens of gigabytes of data to backup, then an eat-as-much-as-you-like service such as Carbonite (www.carbonite.com), which offers unlimited backup for $50 (£25) a year, is well worth exploring. There's a free trial on site, but beware that uploading gigabyte upon gigabyte of data is a horribly slow process on your average ADSL connection, and could exceed your ISP's data cap.

However, there are free alternatives out there. Dropbox (www.dropbox.com) and Microsoft's fledgling Live Mesh (www.mesh.com) services offer 2GB and 5GB of easily synchronised online storage respectively, although both are currently only in beta- testing phases.

The popular Firefox Add-on, GSpace (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1593), allows you to cheekily turn the dormant gigabytes in Gmail accounts into backup vaults. Diino (www.diino.co.uk) also offers 2GB of free backup storage for personal users.
£25 a year, for using a free service rather than Carbonite.

Threaten to walk at the end of a contract

With mobile phone ownership at saturation point, and broadband not a million miles behind, it's hugely expensive for networks and ISPs to recruit new customers. As a result, they'll work hard to keep the ones they've got, which puts you in a position of strength when nearing the end of a contract.

The mobile networks and larger broadband firms have dedicated "customer retention" departments whose job it is to keep you happy, so make sure you have a chat with these people before agreeing to any new deal. Do your research: find out what your network and others are offering new customers and ask your network to match those deals. A gentle threat to fly the coup often works wonders.