Cheap phone calls for home and business have been possible for many years (originally called Least-Cost Routing, or LCR), and recent OFCOM legislation has made the process even easier than ever.

LCR needed the manual re-programming of your company telephone switchboard, which was sometimes a chargeable task and not without unexpected hitches.

There were also small plug-in dialler boxes which were unreliable, got unplugged or had power inadvertently turned off.

Both methods “routed” your phone call off the main BT network, onto another carrier of your choice and usually at substantially cheaper rates. However, if anything went wrong, your phone calls could “leak” back onto the BT network incurring the higher BT cost and defeating the object.

To ensure freedom of choice between carriers, and break BT’s monopoly on phone calls, a successor service to LCR was introduced (which is actually a BT service) called “Carrier Pre-Select” or CPS.

CPS is applied at the local BT Exchange carrying your outbound phone calls, and causes the call to route automatically over your chosen carrier’s telephone network transparently, and frequently at substantial savings over BT rates.

Furthermore, the service is guaranteed by BT so that any “leaked” calls on their network as a result of any problems incur compensation from them.

All telephone network carriers now offer this service, some of them with on-line convenience and many useful on-line management capabilities, and it can be in place within 2 weeks of your request. You can even register all your homeworker’s telephone numbers onto the service, for single-bill convenience and workgroup savings.