Slash ££ in UK on phone, broadband

Line provider

BT used to be the sole line provider in UK but things have changed over the past few years. Now others have jumped on that bandwagon. Put aside Cable providers like soon-to-merge NTL and Telewest, your best bet would be to choose between Homecall, Onetel or Bulldog. The first two offers it for only £9.99 per month, a £6.12 reduction over a month. Bulldog still has a £10.50 bill attached but its advantage lies elsewhere.

Broadband offer

E7even has a deal whereby you can get a 1MB line with a free modem with free connection for only £240 for 12 months. The problem being that you'd be tied up for two years with the same provider and you have to pay in advance. But it is unlimited, uncapped and unmetered and not limited to unbundled regions. But that's not all, you also get a dial up backup service and a 50MB webspace with CGI access and more.

If you are a power user, then Bulldog interactive will charge you only £29.50 for a 8MB line with no download cap. The catch will be that you'll have to rent the phone line from them. No big deal.

Whether you are a power user or a casual one, UKonline has one offer that you cannot refuse provided that you live in one of their LLU areas. Most people in London will; up to 4.4 million houses do. Their unlimited 512K offer costs only £9.99 per month while their 8MB costs £29.99. There's a 500GB allowance for that last package - that's roughly four DVD's per day - a contention ratio of 33:1 and a one off setup fee of £50.

Phone

Just forget about any unlimited calls packages. They're good if you are a very heavy user but useless if you only do two dozen calls per day. Call18866.com has been the best option for me. Calls cost you only 2p per connection. Not per minute or per hour. This means that you can talk on without having to end the call after one hour. Plus calls to a number of destinations, including the US and Spain are only 2p/min. A quick calculation will show you that if you do on average less than 25 calls a day, then you call18866 is better.

You can therefore easily slash you phone bill by switching to the service providers above. If you do have a better deal or any correction. Please do not hesitate to drop me a line. µ