Corporate mobile rates

[cabby]

I work for reasonable sized company international company that has something like 500 mobile / blackberry contracts on the go at any one time. We have a lot of international work meaning lots of international calls and consequently some high bills (£150/person/month is not unusual for those travelling).

We currently use o2 and I'm amazed a how poor a deal we get (at least that is me perception e.g. blackberry line rental £29/month. We also have to buy new/replacement handsents at full price if bought from o2 i.e. no upgrades or replacement if lost/stolen.

Seem very high to me + interested to know how this compares to others experiences.

[burble]

When I was consolidating a number of different mobile phone accounts I had meetings with all the main service providers and it became clear from the offset that O2 were not interested in being competative. I'm only dealing with the UK side of our company, so around 60 devices but we're paying:

- No line rental, monthly rolling contract for new numbers

- £8k/year hardware budget

- 50% discount on accessories and car kit installations

- Blackberry contracts are £5 for BIS or £7.50 for BES

- All calls from within the UK to other mobiles on the account plus the office are FOC

- Huge bank of inclusive miniutes, I forget how many.

Etc, etc. That's with Vodafone who were easily more open to negotiation than any of the others.

[chasdrury]

We recently changed to T-Mobile and found that Vodafone were not willing to negociate but T-Mob were, and with the merger now confirmed and approved with orange I guess the network will get better too (not that it's terrible now). O2 didn't want to come close to T-Mob either. We are similar setup to Burble, BES is £7.50 a month, and our inclusive minutes include Europe, Australia and US too. So really, the only calls we pay for are when roaming / 118xxx and 08/09 numbers

Chas

[cabby]

cheers folks - very useful + will pass onto our IT bods.

[Mac]

You don't want one of these

[Calm Chris]

One of my ex duties at BA was mobile.

3000 units used across the global. We tendered every 18 months and Voda always one it.

The UK call cost was 3p a minute off net. We re-engineered the site telecoms systems and got Voda to set a VPN cloud for six digit dialling via 4 x megastream circuits.

This allowed office based extn users to dial the last six digits of the mobile number and connect, it also allowed the mobiles to dial BA office extensions as six digit numbers and BA mobile to mobile as six digit extns.

This dropped the monthly costs from £350k to £175k a month or so.

There' are easy ways to save money on mobile. Changing VM notification from call the user to text, when overseas means the charge is a text rather than a overseas call.

OK the phone user still has to dial the VM box to access messages, but 1 call would pick all VM's rather than call answer VM 1, call answer VM2 etc

When I did cost saving we'd target the top 100 users each month. Those would sit in the monthly cost £500 all the way up to £2500 a month for one mobile bill

Tender the mobiles out ! If you did UK mobiles via VPN / megastream / IP reroute all UK land to mobile, all mobile to UK and mobile to mobile could be routed via the VPN and fixed at a much lower cost.

[_Tone_]

What a funny post!

I got an email from my manager about my O2 bill last week, whilst I was in South Africa I dumped some data onto my home folder and then some other software down whilst on 3G - whilst I am not bragging or making this sound funny because I was in shock for a while after my bill was over £9000!

I am glad that they understand all I was doing was executing my duties!!

We have a year left on our O2 account and I am sure we will be looking around - we have only 40 odd devices I believe and are moving off WM6 devices to blackberry curves now.

Tone