Your phone bill will be cheaper because a good chunk of the time is taken by the connection setup time and the scanning for new data to download. If you skip all that, the extra time to download the extra data is less then the time you save by avoiding the connection setup. But, keep in mind it's not just the future you need to consider. Replay does not update it's listings until the DAY of the broadcast so your data will always be out of date. For example, the Buffy episode this week was extended by 10 minutes. That change to the guide did not show up until the morning of the showing. If you only dialed in every few days and missed that night's call, your Buffy recording would have terminated 10 minutes early and you'd have been really pissed I'm sure (If you like the show that is... bleck...). So what you save in money, you may lose in reliability of recordings. It's your call. But are you sure there are no local numbers? Others have indicated that they put in zip codes of neighboring big cities and often times get numbers in the list that are local to them but didn't show up under their zip code. Something to try some day.