Paul Brislen: Free? It's just another word for how we pay

Your "free" local calls are potentially costing you more than if you paid for them individually. Unfortunately, just as I discover this great money saver, Telecom axes the product.

How many local calls do you make? One a day? One or two a day?

I discovered that in my house we made 44 local phone calls last month. We spoke for around 120 minutes and paid a grand total of $8 for them.

We've downgraded our phone line from the standard "HomeLine" service, costing $39.85 a month, to the "HomeLine economy" version that costs $25 a month but which means we pay for each local call.

Each local call costs 20c for up to two hours, which is pretty good if you're like me and spend most of your time asleep or at work.

For the first time I got a bill that showed just how much local calling we do at home.

I was astounded. All this time I've been paying full whack for free local calls and not using the service enough to make it worthwhile.

Free, it turns out, can cost more than paid.

Telecom tells me that if you make more than 16 calls a week, you're better off on the free calling plan, and that the average household makes 32 calls a week.

That's fine, but how many of us work for a living and make very few or no calls at all during the week?

If I call someone from home it's just as likely to be a cellphone or freephone number these days, so I'd say the average number of local calls I make is probably falling.

And so it is that Telecom has discontinued the product, claiming there are plenty of alternative plans available for those on a low or fixed income.

There's a plan for the over sixties and one run in conjunction with the budget advisory service for those who need to cut costs.

That's good news for those groups, but I'm more interested in customers who spend most of their day out of the house and really only make local calls in the evening or weekends.

Of course, there's more to this than just local calling.

When Telecom was privatised and sold, there was only one caveat: the Kiwi Share Obligation, which cemented in New Zealanders' minds the idea that free local calling was A Good Thing. The calls weren't free, of course. We pay the monthly line rental and that covers local calls as well. If, however, we've been paying more than we needed to, just to be able to claim the calls are free, then we've gained nothing over the past decade but the right to give Telecom money.

Just look at the cellphone market. Telecom and Vodafone have between them put phones in the hands of over a million New Zealanders and it shows no signs of slowing down any time soon. Yet those calls all cost a great deal more than my 20c per two hours.

The cellphone companies even find they're able to give me some free minutes each month with my plan, and there are others that offer so many free text messages and photo messages as well.

The new 3G networks being built will provide even greater capacity for traffic, which should drive down the cost of a cellphone call, and I'm sure the companies will pass that saving on to the users, even if it's not quite to the level of a landline call.

So here I am, calling for an end to free local calling. I know, I can't quite believe it myself.

Without the Kiwi Share there's none of that nonsense about commercially non-viable customers, so the other telcos won't find themselves paying Telecom whenever they take customers off the incumbent.

City users won't be seen to be subsidising rural folk for connections and we can actually see just what the costs really are in making voice calls.

As the market moves towards broadband for all, the idea of paying separately for voice calls becomes a nonsense.

Voice will just be another packet carried on the network and the costs of a voice call will drop through the floor. As an example, Skype is offering international voice calls over the internet at a price of 4USc per minute.

You can keep your $5 weekends, the future is already here.

* Email Paul Brislen