New York (CNN/Money) - Chances are, the grand total of your long-distance phone bill has been steadily creeping higher.

Faced with competition from local carriers, low-cost upstarts, wireless service, e-mail and instant messaging, the telephone giants are scrambling to hold onto their long-distance meal tickets. Rather than continuing to duke it out with the lowest prices (which didn't seem to cut it) MCI, AT&T and Sprint have been steadily upping their rates and adding new fees.

"The largest carriers have raised rates each and every month this year," said Bill Hardekopf, CEO of SaveOnPhone.com. "Instead of increasing across the board they have been increasing rates for one plan one month and another the next month."

This year alone, MCI has reported at least 20 different rate or fee increases. In May, it increased operator assistance from $4.99 a call to $5.99 a call. In June it will raise its "property tax surcharge" from 1.03 percent to 1.4 percent, and in July it will levy a 1.4 percent "carrier cost recovery charge." This is on top of the per-minute rate increases it's been rolling out throughout the year, in which it's changed many 7-cent plans to 9-cent plans.

"For years MCI was putting downward pressure on the industry, but when things started to unravel for them it went the other way," said Rich Sayers, who tracks rate increases on his website Phone-bill-alert.com. "Now they're leading the price hikes."

The nation's largest carrier, AT&T, has also been raising its prices. In May, what was a 7-cent rate with no monthly fees increased to 10 cents a minute, a 43 percent change. Earlier this year AT&T raised the monthly charge on its One Rate 7 cents offer to $4.95 from $3.95 for new customers and increased rates on other One Rate plans as well. Meanwhile, customers in various states have alerted Sayers of a $1.95 monthly service charge for in-state long-distance.

As for Sprint, "they win the booby prize," said Samuel Simon, chairman of the Telecommunications Research & Action Center (TRAC). "They were the first to put a 'property tax surcharge' on their bill, and they are also charging people for the frequent flier miles they accrue with their service."

You don't have to have an MBA to know that raising prices and rolling out new fees is not necessarily the best strategy in the face of tight competition. But the telephone giants are blessed with a good deal of apathy on the part of their customers.

"Most residential consumers don't spend a lot of time scrutinizing their bills and they don't want to change," said Simon. "The carriers know this."

In their defense, AT&T, MCI and Sprint say they offer a wide variety of plans to suit many different kinds of customers.

That said, don't expect carriers to call you up and point out that you're overpaying them. Simon estimates that 30 to 40 percent of AT&T's customers are in their most basic plan, which charges 30 cents a minute for weekday calls, 25 cents in the evening and 16 cents on weekends.

A person who averages as little as five minutes of long-distance calls a day would spend about $73 a month with the AT&T Basic Rate plan but only around $23 for the same calls made with the Matrix Value plan, according to TRAC. Someone who averaged about 18 minutes of long-distance calls a day would pay $237 a month for MCI's Basic Dial plan versus $53 with Frontier's InterState plan.

Before you can begin to decipher the dozens and dozens of plans now available, you need to spend a little time getting to know your old phone bills. You'll want to get a sense of when and where you typically call, how much time you spend on the phone and what you pay for each minute.

Unless your long-distance calls add up to less than 15 or 20 minutes a month, you should not opt for a basic plan (or if you do, use a prepaid calling card). Then again, you don't want to pay a lot in up-front fees if you don't make that many calls. For example, under the A&T Monthly Minutes plan you can get 500 minutes of long-distance calls for $25. That works out to just 5 cents a minute if you use all of your time, but is 25 cents a minute if you use only 100 minutes.

If you make most of your calls during the nights and weekends, you could save money by using a plan designed specifically for off-peak calls. If you don't have a discernible calling pattern -- or don't care to figure out what it is -- the best route is probably a one-rate plan for all hours of the day and all days of the week.

Don't overlook offers from local carriers (Baby Bells can now sell long-distance) or smaller carriers such as Zone LD, Pioneer and Capsule, which have long-distance rates around 4 cents a minute.

"The quality of the phone call with small carriers is the same, you just haven't heard about these companies because they don't spend a lot of money marketing themselves," said Hardekopf, whose site is funded in part by referring new customers to such carriers.

To get an idea of what calling plans work best for you, check out SaveOnPhone's calculator.

Now that long-distance carriers can sell local service and vice versa, bundled plans have also become popular.

"For a lot of people it makes sense to look at bundling first, because in bringing all of your business to one company you're regarded as a better customer and you could stand to save some money," said Simon.

Perhaps the easiest way to determine whether such a package will work is to take your average monthly bills for local and long-distance, add them together and compare to the bundled plan. Just be sure that in bundling you don't end up paying for services you don't use.

Of course, you can always skip traditional wireline service altogether, as many consumers now do. With prepaid long-distance minutes included in most wireless packages, consumers are wise to use all of their minutes there before they pay more for long distance. (See "Three secrets about your cell phone.")

Dial around service with 10-10 numbers may also work, as long as you avoid connection fees and per-call minimums. Finally, prepaid calling cards also make sense, assuming you don't mind dialing all of those numbers. Costco and Sam's Club, for example, sell prepaid cards for well under 4 cents a minute.