Consumer Information

Insight into the Long Distance Industry as a Whole and on the Web

Thank you for visiting our site. I have been marketing long distance online since 1999 and have learned quite a bit about the industry. I hope this document proves useful to you. This information will save you money, regardless if you use a service that we provide on this site or somebody else's.

The long distance industry has always been a monopoly. There are just a few companies who hold the power of our phone lines. Even now, with the appearance of hundreds of different companies, we still live in a country where only a few companies actually control our calls. Most smaller long distance companies are actually resellers of the monopoly. Moreover, the new telecom laws that were designed to "increase competition" have only lead to these same few long distance carriers combining into even bigger companies. Also, these same companies have bought local carriers too. Consequently, we pay far more for long distance than we should.

Since these few companies are so large and charge so much, they can spend billions on marketing and advertising. These billions have to come from somewhere: Higher rates. I'll keep it simple. No matter what "special plan" you are offered, you can almost certainly get better rates elsewhere. There are some exceptions to this, but they only apply to large companies. The largest companies will not save you money.

If you want to save money on your long distance bill you will end up dealing with a reseller. In most industries, we would choose to purchase directly from the source and avoid the "middleman." However, in the case of the long distance industry, the middleman can get a MUCH lower rate for us. Why? Simply put, 10 million minutes and 100 million minutes of long distance cost the carrier about the same to "produce." In fact, the major cost involved in the long distance industry is billing the end users (as we know, customer service does not cost them much.) The costs for the actual call traffic is minimal and has already been paid for. A reseller will buy millions of minutes at a low rate and pass SOME of the savings on to us.

So, a minute of long distance is the same thing, regardless of who you get it from. However, in the case of long distance, getting it from the source is not the cheapest way. Get it from a middleman. Phone cards are a good way to "cut out the source" and get the best rates. Our partners have purchased minutes in LARGE bulk from the top carriers. Not only that, they get the carriers to compete with each other to get the rates down even further. This is one way that the phone rates on these cards is much lower than you could get on t.v. or the store.

Another reason rates are low now is because marketing costs are extremely low. If you have come to this site, chances are you have seen many other sites on the Internet today that advertise long distance service. There are literally hundreds of thousands of web sites that market long distance. Why? Well, long distance carriers, in an effort to save money, now employ thousands of agents to market their services. These agents all put up there own web sites on the Internet. There are not really millions of long distance companies, only millions of web sites But, the carrier will give the agents that market for them a small percentage of all sales generated. This is the cheapest form of marketing in existence today and a major reason that rates are so low now.

Of course, you still should do some searching to find the best rates and service possible. We have tried to do that for you with the services we offer, but you may want to keep looking. Please bookmark our site and then go to a search engine like Google or DMOZ. Type in "cheap long distance" and see the types of sites you come up with. Who knows? You may even find a better bargain then the rates we offer.

Again, thank you for visiting our site!

Aaron Bazar
Univtel Phone Cards