The Localphone Blog

As I’m sure many of you aware, from Monday 1st of December 2008 the rate of VAT in the UK is falling from 17.5% to 15%. As a result we will be lowering the majority of our GBP and EUR rates to match (note that not all destinations will be affected due to rounding and banding). Customers with USD accounts are not charged VAT and as a result their rates will be unaffected.

The new rates will come into force at 00:00 GMT on Monday 1st December. Strictly speaking we should also lower customers’ current call credit balance to match the VAT reduction, but as a gesture of good will to our loyal customers we have decided to let you keep the difference.

Diwali starts tomorrow, and for the six days of the festival Localphone will be offering discounted calls to India. If your total call duration over the promotion is more than 200 minutes you can get an effective rate of as low as 2.2p / 3.4¢ / 3c per minute.

After the festival is over we’ll look at how many minutes you used and will top up your calling credit according to the table on our Diwali Promotion page.

As we pass our first year in business we have looked at each and every country to see where we can afford to cut our rates, and the good news is we’ve found hundreds of destinations where we can save you even more money.

There are too many savings to list here, but a few of our more popular destinations include:

Our new low rates are effective immediately, so please check our call rates or your dashboard to see if your tariff has been reduced.

No Compromise on Quality

With our latest round of price cuts we believe we have positioned ourselves as a true market leader balancing both quality and cost. Where a competitor advertises lower rates they are likely hiding the true cost of calling, or have sacrificed quality to achieve that price. Where a competitor’s rates are higher we do not believe they will offer the quality to justify the difference. As we continue to grow we will use our increased buying power to achieve even lower rates for our customers.

Rate Increases

While reviewing our tariffs we also found a few destinations where we simply can’t continue to offer acceptable levels of quality and still turn a profit at the current rates. We’ll be e-mailing those affected shortly and will post notices on the Localphone site, before updating these rates early next week.