Between 2023 and 2025, our consulting team at DialPhone Limited audited phone bills from 500 small and mid-sized businesses across 14 industries. We published the results internally last year. This is the first time we are sharing the data publicly.
The Headline Number
The median business overpays $847 per month on telecommunications. That is $10,164 per year going to services, features, and infrastructure that modern alternatives have made obsolete.
Where the Money Goes
We categorized every dollar of waste into five buckets:
| Category | Median Monthly Waste | % of Total |
|---|---|---|
| Unused phone lines | $285 | 34% |
| Legacy maintenance contracts | $195 | 23% |
| Long distance charges | $142 | 17% |
| Feature add-on fees | $128 | 15% |
| Carrier regulatory surcharges | $97 | 11% |
Unused Lines
The biggest source of waste. Companies add lines as they grow but never remove them when employees leave or departments consolidate. One 45-person company was paying for 73 phone lines — 28 of which had not received a call in over six months. Monthly cost of those ghost lines: $1,260.
Legacy Maintenance Contracts
PBX maintenance contracts auto-renew annually. Many companies pay $200-600 per month to maintain hardware they could replace with a cloud service that costs less than the maintenance contract alone. We found 12 companies paying more in annual maintenance than the entire PBX was worth on the secondary market.
Long Distance
This should not exist as a line item in 2026. Every modern VoIP provider includes unlimited domestic calling. Yet 340 of the 500 companies we audited were still paying per-minute long distance rates ranging from $0.03 to $0.15 per minute.
The Fix Takes Two Weeks
The median company in our dataset could eliminate all five categories of waste by switching to a cloud VoIP provider. The typical migration takes 14 business days including number porting.
Post-migration costs for the median company: $1,450 per month (down from $2,297). That includes unlimited calling, mobile apps, call recording, auto-attendant, and video conferencing — features that were individually billed add-ons on the legacy system.
How We Conducted This Analysis
Every audit followed the same process. We obtained three months of invoices, mapped every line item to a cost category, identified items that could be eliminated or reduced through modern alternatives, and calculated the net savings after accounting for the replacement service cost.
We did not include companies where VoIP was unsuitable (primarily rural locations with unreliable internet) or companies already on modern VoIP platforms. The 500 companies in this dataset were all on traditional or hybrid phone systems at the time of audit.
What You Can Do Right Now
Pull your last phone bill. Count the number of active phone lines. Compare it to your employee headcount. If lines exceed headcount by more than 20%, you are paying for ghost lines.
Then calculate your per-user telecom cost. Divide total monthly spend by total employees. If the result exceeds $40, a modern VoIP system will almost certainly save you money.
For a specific analysis of your bills, providers like VestaCall offer free telecom audits — send your invoices and receive a detailed cost comparison within 48 hours.
Data from DialPhone Limited telecom audit program, 2023-2025. Sample: 500 SMBs, 14 industries, US and UK.
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