You wouldn’t think, as a small business, that you would have trouble with communications these days. WiFi, broadband, satellite... there is a bewildering number of ways of keeping in touch.

But most of them depend on the telephone and that can sometimes be a problem as the wonderfully named Raise Your Glasses Ltd from Taunton (a name made for journalists you might think) found when they moved premises recently.

"We all worked very hard to ensure that the business could reopen for trading on Saturday," Gill Marshall, one of the company's directors, says.

"All product and service suppliers were informed of the change and only one let us down – BT.

"We had arranged for the telephone to be disconnected at midday and transferred to the new location using the same numbers. This was confirmed in writing and also orally by BT. Our telephone was disconnected at midday but unfortunately not reconnected. Our customers cannot telephone us and we cannot get any positive response from BT.

"My husband and I spent much of the afternoon on the telephone to BT only to be cut off twice after eventually speaking to a human being following the ‘pressing 1 for this and 2 for that’. We were then informed that the work had been completed on one line and was in progress on the other, only to find that one line did ring when someone is ringing in, but it didn’t ring at our premises. The other line was dead.

"We were finally connected the following day by around midday. No excuses, no apology, nothing! I was advised by BT the next day that we should have been offered a free redirection to another land or mobile line - we weren't. We very nearly missed an order worth several hundred pounds, completely frustrated another customer as he couldn't get through to make a credit card payment and the rest - we will never know."

At my small Midlands publishing company, we hardly use BT at all these days. We are, apparently, at the cutting edge of technology, using VOiP (voice over internet protocol) and it seems to me the best way for small companies to communicate especially if they have regular suppliers and people who work from home.

I use a provider called Skype (a free download), but there are others in the same market. You need broadband but once you’ve got that you can talk to other Skype users for free wherever they are - Chingford or China - so long as you’ve got a microphone with your computer.

So if all your homeworkers have VOiP, you can cut your communications costs considerably. Likewise, if you have lots of communications with a supplier. If he gets VOiP as well, your frequent calls cost nothing.

Of course you still need someone like BT to provide you with a line for broadband, but you have no call charges on top.

When it comes to calling landlines, Skype seems to be cheaper than most although such is the array of "plans" and charges these days that you can never be sure. But if I’m calling my editor at Times Online, I pay less than €0.02 a minute. If I’m calling my mate in America, I also pay less than €0.02 per minute. If he’s on his mobile, the charges are the same. It’s more expensive calling 0870 numbers and mobiles in this country, but then it is whatever system you use.

And a publishing colleague "Skyped" (I’m into the terminology as well) me from Peru the other day, not to say anything worthwhile but just to make a transatlantic phone call that didn’t cost anything.

But unless you use satellite communications (and I assume Skype works on that) you are reliant on a fixed line and Gill Marshall could have been Skyped up to the eyeballs but still wouldn’t have been able to ring anybody because of BT’s delays.

Of course, BT are not the only provider of phone lines in this country. You can go via one of the cable companies if you have one in your area (I do not), and Energis Communication provides line rental, but you have to have quite a heavy volume of traffic to benefit from these.

So, in the meantime, I will continue to pay a monthly line rental to BT, cheered by the thought that that will be the only fee that they will receive from me.

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