The following is a guest post by TC2 Senior Consultant Sreeni Katta, who is based in Singapore.

I was in Mumbai recently to meet with India's major Telecommunication solution providers in conjunction with a procurement project for one of our clients. Vodafone's team, who were one of the invitees to the meetings, surprised all of us in the room by announcing their new offerings. Apparently Vodafone now offers National Private Leased Circuits (NPLC) in India, and expects to offer International Private Leased Circuits (IPLC), Internet Leased Lines, and even MPLS networks soon.

The first question that came to my mind was: Why on earth did a major global wireless service provider decide to venture into the untested waters of enterprise networking services -- and in India, no less?

In fact, Vodafone's historical (although admittedly recently softening) policy of religiously disposing of fixed line assets that it acquired incidentally through various acquisitions throughout the world, made this announcement particularly surprising. But once we'd reflected a little, we realized that in many ways it makes a lot of sense.

Firstly, enterprise customers continuously strive for a one-stop shop for all of their telecommunication needs, and a pure wireless focus leaves Vodafone behind some of its key competition. Secondly, India is at the heart of the huge growth potential in Asia Pacific. In fact, India has one of the world's largest mobile phone user markets, with 10 million new subscribers signing up every month.

Vodafone does have a very well established emerging market strategy. And over the years it has disposed of ownership interests in a number of saturated western markets in order to invest in emerging markets instead. So making a move into wireline services in a growth market, rather than in one of its more established western markets (where growth is limited and strong incumbent competitors already exist), makes good sense for Vodafone.

It also turns out that Vodafone will be able to leverage its existing wireless network backbone. It won't be building infrastructure from scratch in order to offer wireline services, rather simply upgrading and building on its existing in-country wireless network backbone. This is consistent with other carriers that offer integrated service offerings on a single platform to cater to telephony, data and video solutions.

Although a common and consistent procurement objective of enterprise customers is indeed to reduce their number of service providers, this objective is often based on little more than "telecom suppliers are a pain to deal with" and therefore the fewer the better. There can be clear efficiencies to having less, not more suppliers, but many carriers have not yet come up with much more than limited bundled discounts to reward customers who buy both wireline and wireless services.

But slowly the advantages should become more pronounced, not least as fixed to wireless integration and unified communications bring wireline and wireless solutions and technologies closer together. If Vodafone begins to establish itself as a supplier able to offer wireline and wireless services, it will be well placed to take advantage of such trends.

Vodafone also has some experience in managed services that it may be able to leverage as it moves into wireline services (not least in a disparate region such as Asia Pacific).

For a number of years Vodafone's Global Enterprise (VGE) group has been offering large global enterprise customers a one-stop shop for all a customer's global wireless needs. For countries where Vodafone does not have a wireless network, or one of its partners does not offer services, Vodafone will manage a third party supplier on the customer's behalf. Vodafone will also take care of migrating current suppliers' services to its, or its partners', network.

Vodafone established this service offering as a solution for customers desperate to deal with a reduced number of suppliers, despite global wireless services being the most fragmented global telecom market of them all. Not all customers have found it to be a compelling offering (the detail can fall short of the marketing), and extending this model to wireline services will present a different set of challenges -- particularly for global MPLS services where having a single supplier has technological advantages. But in a region as fragmented as APAC, if Vodafone is able to build on its experience in the wireless market to be able to present a similar offering to customers on the wireline side, then this could be a distinct differentiator.

So we regard this as a welcome move by Vodafone in India, and wonder if it is a sign of a wider drive by Vodafone into wireline services in Asia Pacific and beyond. In Asia Pacific in particular, Vodafone will come up against some familiar faces (not least BT but also the other main global providers of AT&T, Orange and Verizon) as well as newer players emerging from APAC such as Reliance and Tata that are investing heavily to win more customers. It will help drive more competition in this burgeoning and high-growth market, and it gives additional options to enterprise customers. We will be watching these developments carefully to see how they unfold.

The following is a guest post by TC2 Senior Consultant Theresa Knutson, who is based in Sioux City, Iowa.

U.S.-based wireless suppliers offer an interesting side benefit in their corporate contracts -- employee purchase discounts that deliver savings on your employees' personal use devices while adding to the total line count and contributory spend in your overall contract. This translates into higher discounts on your corporate liable devices, saving your company money.

Sounds like a win-win scenario, right? It can be, if managed correctly.

Each supplier has a different way of referring to these employee purchase programs. Some call them individual liable (IL) or employee accounts (EA), and others refer to them as individual responsible units (IRU).

Whatever the reference, the definition is simple -- these are wireless devices that your employees and their families have for personal use that are paid entirely by the employee but that are also eligible for discounts under your corporate contract. For most companies, the number of individual liable lines can greatly outnumber the corporate liable line count.

All of the wireless suppliers are in a "race to win the market share" game, so leveraging their corporate relationships to build their consumer base of users is a smart move. And on the surface their interest in promoting these programs is similar to yours.

Suppliers typically have tiered discount tables that provide increased discounts as the total number of corporate liable and employee liable line counts grows. If you have a company with a significant number of employees, you can leverage the employee purchase programs to increase your total line count/spend under the contracts, increasing the discount your company receives on the corporate liable lines.

Some wireless suppliers will also offer annual rebates to the company of a nominal percentage of the employee purchase spend. Another windfall.

Employees love these programs as they can save them and their families 15+% each month on their wireless bills. And with the rapid expansion of wireless devices to all aspects of our life, every family budget needs some savings. If a family spends $75/month on their personal wireless phone bills and saves 15%, that translates into $11.25/month or $135/year.

But remember: If you have significant employee liable lines under your corporate contract, you are further bound to this supplier, making it more difficult to move corporate business to another supplier, which diminishes your negotiating leverage.

Make sure you understand the double-edged sword here. No one is going to be able to force employees to change their personal wireless supplier. But if you do manage to convince them to sign up, and then for your own corporate reasons you decide to change carriers, those employees will definitely voice outrage if they lose a discount that they were previously enjoying. And that will leave you in a cumbersome situation with any of your suppliers that have any sizable employee spend. They'll know that it will be difficult for you to ever completely get rid of them, regardless of how poorly they treat you in terms of providing competitive pricing, services and terms.

So how do you make this employee benefit a net winner rather than a net loser for your competitive procurement position? The answer is to leverage the ratio of large volumes of employee lines/spend to smaller volumes of corporate lines/spend and, where possible and practical, select discount tiers than can largely be met purely by the employee volume, regardless of what the corporate volume is.

That way, your negotiations on the corporate pricing and terms -- and remember, carrier account teams do care more about the corporate volumes than the employee volumes -- don't need to be distracted by worrying about the implications on the employee discount.

Employee volumes don't tend to undergo significant change over the course of a contract -- individual users are relatively stable and don't tend to change carriers very often. So you shouldn't lose sleep over your discounts being predicated on maintaining an employee volume that you can't directly control. Instead, take advantage of that employee volume stability (and more often continual growth), and use it to minimize your lock-in on the corporate volume.

Being able to move your corporate volume around between carriers will maximize your negotiating leverage. It will keep all your wireless suppliers on their toes for both the corporate and individual-liable lines, and keep them always working towards winning more business by providing better pricing and terms for you.

Wireless carriers want each of your users to spend more money.

Sounds obvious, right? Well, in the escalating wars over consumer wireless terms and conditions -- with the latest flashpoint AT&T's coming June 1 imposition of a $325 early termination fee on smartphones -- it's easy to lose sight of this simple fact.

On the surface, AT&T's new consumer ETF policy appears designed to lock in iPhone customers while AT&T still has exclusivity. But it's also still related to the drive by all of the carriers for higher Average Revenue Per User (ARPU).

This key ARPU metric dramatically rises whenever users opt for smartphones. And AT&T's nearly equalizing its smartphone ETF with Verizon's already notorious $350 fee indicates a level of confidence that consumers will upgrade to smartphones no matter what. Already that's caused ARPU to zoom past the average $60 a month level that AT&T worked so hard to surpass over the last couple of years, and that AT&T clearly wants to keep moving higher.

So you have to be aware of this reality when negotiating for corporate-liable devices, even if officially the policy is not directly aimed at corporate-responsible units (CRUs). If anything, merely the threat of higher ETFs across the board makes any waiver pool you negotiate that much more valuable. And this dovetails with the carriers' ostensibly "generous" push for unlimited voice plans at lower prices, which are really a stalking horse for unlimited data plans.

By now many corporate telecom managers are feeling the often uncomfortable linkage between the consumer and corporate wireless market, which resides in the fact that device preferences are bubbling up from the user base, which in turn can enable carriers to gain the upper hand in negotiations. But effective modeling of the total cost of ownership of plans, features and devices tips the balance back in your direction. Watch as we explore all of these factors as the wireless procurement stakes grow ever higher.

The FCC's release this week of its National Broadband Plan inherently affects the issue of Universal Service surcharges. FCC officials have gone on record saying that for "universal service" to continue to make sense, at some level it has to refer to broadband, not POTS.

Only one of the four current universal service programs -- the "E-rate" program that provides support to schools and libraries -- explicitly pays for broadband connections. The other three programs -- for "High Cost" areas with many subscribers far from central offices, for low-income consumers, and for rural healthcare facilities -- are still basically telephone subsidies.

The core proposal in the National Broadband Plan is to shift the High Cost program from POTS to broadband, so that people in low-density areas have access to at least one broadband provider, rather than worry so much about whether they have a long copper tail to the CO. But the plan literally lays out a 10-year timeline for achieving this. In several phases before this happens, the plan advises the FCC to create yet new programs, such as a Mobility Fund that would assist areas to obtain 3G and higher wireless coverage where there currently is none.

Clearly that implies that the FCC will have to broaden the universal service revenue base, so that more services are captured under the surcharge (which increases pressure on the carriers to pass along the charges). But oddly for a 376-page report, the National Broadband Plan, when it comes to stating exactly how to do this, simply repeats longstanding USF reform proposals as possibilities (such as charging USF not as a percent of revenues but per phone number or a data connection of some size), rather than formulating a complete USF reform proposal of its own.

That's partly because the plan doesn't actually have the force of law, and isn't a document "voted" on by the full five-member FCC. Instead, both the FCC as a full panel and Congress are supposed to read it, debate the proposals, and eventually act on it. I probably don't have to tell you how complicated, uncertain, or simply futile that can sometimes get!

Thus, for right now, despite the hoopla over the plan and other telecommunications-related provisions of the federal stimulus, we still have the USF system we're stuck with. And both current pressures and forward-looking ideas point to broadening of the services to which surcharges apply.

Indeed, the whole surcharge issue is notable for the sense of powerlessness it can provoke in even sophisticated telecom managers. It would be wishful thinking to suggest that you can simply demand the non-applicability of all new charges when the carriers are bound and determined to pass along what they think they must in today's more complex and uncertain surcharge environment.

Instead, think of all the latest developments as shifting the boundary of where you have the right and obligation to put your foot down. With universal service moving past legacy voice and data, it's now appropriate to be somewhat more aggressive than before and start drawing some distinctions, as follows:

-- Selective knocking out of surcharges. A "best in class" procurement will at least make carriers justify the applicability of surcharges to all services. Try to capture some of these in the contract -- the more specialized the service, and the less justifiable the surcharge, the more likely you are to get a waiver or credit. You might be able to get a contract-term guarantee of no surcharges on an Ethernet service, for example, much more readily than an entire MPLS network, and it's easier to fight the nakedly greedy property tax and regulatory administration surcharges than E911 or USF.

-- No retroactivity. Let the carriers' current conundrum over whether they'll have to go back and pay retroactive surcharges on their MPLS or other revenue bases be exclusively their problem. Make sure to get a no-surcharge-retroactivity guarantee for all your services. Definitely watch out for explicit statements that retroactive pass-alongs will be allowed (Sprint, for example, has been doing this).

-- Look for offsets, but in the right way. You can actually play recent developments to your advantage, in that the carriers' typical insistence of the right to impose new surcharges in mid-contract term can lead you to say pre-emptively that you need lower rate element charges just in case. Be wary, though, of overly clever carrier responses to this idea. We're hearing talk of carriers "pre-bundling" rate element and USF charges in a way that ostensibly freezes the USF pass-along at its current rate. That's fine if the resulting bundle really captures a market rate for the actual network element (e.g. ports or circuits), but "bundles" have a funny way of not actually doing so. Consider asking for credits, but the same caution applies -- there's a right and wrong way to do credits, as discussed at our recent Telecom Negotiation Conference.

Next week I'll look at how all of these factors are beginning to play out in one of the most important new services available -- SIP trunking. The differences in how carriers are handling this are already becoming object lessons in the application of USF to VoIP, IP-network access over dedicated Internet or MPLS, and other elements we've discussed. Almost no issue is more subject to the quality of the design of an RFP than the surcharge results on new services like SIP. It's worth the effort to understand it, and in the meantime feel free to shoot me questions and comments about this whole arena.

In the following guest post, TC2's London-based managing director Ben Fox continues his comments about the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.

Besides the increasing momentum for establishing LTE as a global mobile broadband standard, the other very interesting announcement from Barcelona came from Verizon Wireless and Skype. The two companies reported that, beginning in late March, Verizon Wireless will allow subscribers to use Skype's IP voice application over its network.

By downloading the Skype application to their Verizon Wireless smartphones, end users will be able to call other Skype users around the world for free. This represents a significant change of heart from a carrier (and indeed an industry) that to date has been very territorial in terms of allowing users to take advantage of applications that could reduce its own revenue.

So what's in it for Verizon Wireless? The answer is data revenues. As I noted last month, Verizon Wireless' strategy is currently focused on driving the penetration of data services. And for Verizon Wireless users to be able to use Skype, they will need to subscribe to a voice and data plan.

No doubt Verizon Wireless has calculated that the lost voice revenues from Skype usage will be more than offset by the increased data plan revenues and by the increased adoption of the smartphones that will be needed to use Skype, which typically drive increased average revenue per user (ARPU) compared to more basic devices. Perhaps they're even anticipating a further compensation for lost voice revenues in the increased revenue from the higher ETFs associated with these types of devices and plans!

Skype and Verizon Wireless stated that their agreement is "exclusive", although it is unclear what that really means, since the Skype application has been available for some time on AT&T Mobility's network via the iPhone. Perhaps Verizon Wireless's thinking is that AT&T users have so far only been to use Skype over WiFi, not 3G, access. But a version that operates on GSM/HSPA is supposed to be pending.

Of course Skype does not tend to be an application that large enterprises actively roll out and support for their end-users, so this might have limited initial relevance to business users. However, using Skype (and similar VoIP applications) on a smartphone whilst roaming on WiFi networks to save money, compared to paying $1+ a minute to roam on a GSM network in a foreign country, is a far more intuitive and "traditional" phone experience than using a soft phone (Skype or otherwise) on your laptop. So there is certainly money-saving potential in this area for enterprise customers.

But the more important takeaway for the business user from this Skype/Verizon Wireless announcement is the continuing shift in focus for wireless carriers all around the globe from voice revenues to data revenues, driven by the evolution of all cell phones into smartphones. Similar announcements in 2010 already include Google's Nexus One, Windows Phone 7 for mobiles, the Wholesale Applications Community mobile application alliance, and carriers announcing increased after-sales support for smartphone users. These all demonstrate the importance of smartphones to the carriers and the pressure that all carriers, manufacturers and software developers are under to get ahead of the pack and differentiate their smartphone service offerings.

Although much of the initial adoption of the more innovative services (such as the iPhone and Apple's application store) has been driven by consumers, the carriers, manufacturers and software developers now have business users firmly in their sights. Google has already been talking about a version of its Nexus One aimed at business users, and in the UK, Vodafone is specifically targeting business users in its iPhone adverts.

The bottom line is that we are already seeing business end-users at our clients pressuring their telecoms departments to offer an increasing array of smartphone devices, not the least of which is the iPhone, as well as a rich variety of new services and applications. A BlackBerry that only provides voice calling, email, calendar and contact directory functions is no longer enough! Mobile device management, rather than getting easier, will become exponentially more challenging.

On the other hand, when the world ultimately moves to a single global mobile standard -- LTE -- the job of managing your enterprise's global mobility requirements should become somewhat easier, though I'm afraid that the impact of LTE will be a ripple on the ocean compared to the tsunami of challenges presented by user demands for an ever increasing range of smartphone applications and functionality.

The following is a guest post by TC2 managing director Ben Fox, who is based in London.

This week's 2010 Mobile World Congress in Barcelona has been the setting for a number of significant developments in the global mobile marketplace. One of the most significant for enterprise users is the announcement that China Telecom, KDDI and Verizon Wireless, three of the world's largest CDMA operators, have joined the GSM Association (GSMA).

The force that is bridging the CDMA and GSM worlds is the worldwide adoption of the Long Term Evolution (LTE) 3+G (or 4G, depending on the day) standard.

This week's GSMA announcement is further proof that the world is moving to a single global mobile standard, which would bring benefits to all parties, including mobile device manufacturers, carriers and end-users. All parties, that is, except those who don't adopt the standard!

Device manufacturers will be able to focus all their efforts on a single technology platform. Carriers will be able to seamlessly interwork with each other -- even Verizon Wireless and Vodafone, whose incompatible technologies have made them strange bedfellows up until now. And ultimately, we hope, end users won't need to worry about their Verizon Wireless smartphone not working when they travel to Europe (although they will undoubtedly still need to worry about the cost of international roaming).

U.S. users also should not overlook the importance of China Telecom and KDDI joining at the same time as Verizon Wireless. China Telecom is the largest state-owned telecom operator in China, and KDDI is Japan's second-largest cellular operator. We're going to be watching China Telecom's next steps in this space very closely, because historically Chinese carriers have specifically avoided adopting western technologies and instead sought to develop their own solutions. This could signal the beginning of the end of that policy.

Of course the elephant in the room that the announcement ignores is WiMax, the competing 4G technology. Despite being first to market, WiMax does not appear to reach the projected speeds of LTE and, much more importantly, has far less backing from heavyweight global carriers.

Thus describing it as an elephant is probably far too generous. WiMax no doubt has a future in certain key areas such as fixed wireless and greenfield infrastructure builds, but the fact is that the major players are all lining up behind LTE, which makes LTE the hot favourite for the future global mobile standard.

In fact, in a number of ways the world's leading carriers are either acknowledging or finally catching up to technological reality, and this isn't the only announcement from Barcelona that bears this out. Verizon Wireless and Skype have announced that Verizon Wireless will enable Skype calling over its network. I'll have some thoughts about that for the enterprise segment tomorrow.

The following is a guest post by TC2 Senior Consultant Janis Stephens, whose special expertise includes many of the disciplines surrounding contract compliance and bill auditing.

Everyone assumes that their telecom bills will contain errors. But most enterprises accept their carriers' commitment tracking reports at face value. Why is that?

Commitment tracking reports are spreadsheets or tables designed to show the progress that customers are making toward retiring the dollar commitment that's typically embedded in an enterprise deal. They're often referred to as "MAC tracking reports" because the "Minimum Annual Commitment" is the most common (but not only) type of quid pro quo built into carrier deals.

But these reports are notoriously unreliable. And it's easy to let carriers get away with bad tracking reports, either because they're presented at an extremely high level -- monthly spend grouped into broad categories with no further explanation -- or because they contain excruciating detail that makes it a real chore to pinpoint problems.

Often the basic categories on these reports include such broad strokes as "domestic" and "international" that leave it to the imagination what exactly is being included. And some items may never find their way into the reported revenue, such as data and managed services that were introduced after the the deal was first signed, or international access revenue that your carrier may not think of as its own but is definitely part of your deal.

But the really big challenge in commitment tracking is the complex interplay between billing systems, contracts, service guides, and tracking reports. The last thing you should assume is that your carrier has a clean, "push-button" way to produce an exact revenue match to the services listed as commitment-eligible in your contract.

In some carrier organizations, account teams may be asked to grab bills and reports from different places for MAC-eligible services to produce the tracking report, leaving you at the mercy of essentially manual procedures. In other cases, there may be a conflict in the parties' understanding of the list of MAC-eligible services, especially if the carrier's service guide is more specific than the contract. Example: If your MAC-eligible list doesn't specify advanced features for call centers, and you assume that merely listing the name of your carrier's dedicated inbound call platform covers it, you'll have a problem if the service guide says that features aren't commitment-eligible.

And in some cases, even the MAC-eligible "list" is really an amalgam of several different contract attachments and side letters, practically begging for tracking report problems. Just as billing errors are almost always in the supplier's favor, tracking report errors most typically understate your commitment-eligible spend. But correcting those errors through a tracking-report verification is a broad, all-encompassing process that often requires you to examine the entire chain of procurement and fulfillment to unlock the puzzle.

If a tracking report indicates a potential shortfall, or if it indicates that a customer's spend is close to the commitment, a comprehensive analysis of the tracking report is warranted (which, of course, is something that TC2 can help you with). And if the supplier is providing inaccurate information, it's best to challenge it early rather than wait for the supplier to formally declare the company in shortfall, and then try to dispute a shortfall penalty.

But in almost any situation, customers will gain leverage during their contract term by knowing where their spend really stands vs. their commitment. In the current recession, the big carriers continue to try to box in customers with non-market-based renewal and extension offers and other one-off arrangements. An inaccurate or even uncertain view of how much cushion you have vs. your commitment robs from your ability to present a competitive face to the market and bring out the carriers' more aggressively competitive personality.

And think about it: Even if you do have a substantial cushion, you still aren't likely to use it to move traffic to another carrier, or to generate a better offer short of an optimally timed RFP, unless you know for certain what that action will mean for your remaining flexibility.

Some of these same dynamics are increasingly playing out in wireless deals. Customers often eagerly track their spend, usage or device counts according to how they contribute to the discount tiers that the business is expecting (or, in some cases, that they've effectively promised to individual-liable users). But many enterprises also need to verify the dollar spend or usage that contributes to average monthly spend/usage commitments that competitive flat-rate (but not all-inclusive) voice plans often entail in corporate deals.

Many of these customers are experiencing the same uncertainty over supplier tracking reports that steal their confidence in securing the benefits of existing wireless deals and gaining forward leverage. Unraveling the complexity of the back-office systems that carriers employ to bill and report is a key management task that enterprises are facing across their entire telecom spend. The dedicated effort to solve this challenge will pay dividends in both dollars and confidence.

The following is a guest post by TC2 Senior Consultant Mark Sheard, who is based in London.

Did 2009 mark the end of overcharging for text messaging and data applications while roaming in Europe? You might think so because of last year's European Union roaming caps on texting and data and video applications, as well as an accompanying overall mechanism designed to put a brake on soaring mobile bills.

But that's only part of the story. European and multinational enterprises can only get the full benefit of these measures to solve the chronic problem of runaway mobile charges if they take additional steps. These corporate 'bill shocks' (as the EU put it) might not be as immediately obvious as those, for example, on my teenage daughter's mobile, but close inspection could be more shocking than you thought!

Telecom managers with responsibility for users traveling through Europe should remember the unique aspect of mobile cost management within the EU. The "single market" paradoxically can make it more difficult to keep costs under control. Roaming charges often begin at every national boundary even as users freely move about the continent.

Viviane Reding, the EU Telecoms Commissioner, was addressing this when she described the EU's objective in enacting mobile caps: "What we want to achieve is simple: sending text messages or downloading data via a mobile phone while being in another EU country should not be substantially more expensive than at home. This is the logic of the borderless single market."

Accordingly, since July 1st of 2009, roaming charges for SMS (text messages) have been capped by the EU at a retail cost of €0.11, which compare very favorably with the average cost of a "roamed" text message in the EU between October 2007 and March 2008 of €0.29. The key elements of the regulation are as follows:

-- Limits the price for sending a text message while abroad at €0.11. Receiving an SMS in another EU country remains free of charge.

-- Reduces the cost of surfing the web and downloading movies or video programs with a mobile phone while abroad by introducing a maximum wholesale cap of €1 per megabyte downloaded. This limit will be decreased each year.

-- Further reduces prices for mobile roaming calls with a maximum tariff of €0.43 for making a call and €0.19 for receiving one.

-- Introduces per-second billing after the first 30 seconds for calls made and immediately for calls received.

But these regulations are only a start. Most businesses of scale should be securing competitive rates that are better than the regulated capped rates. If a quick review of your contracts shows that you haven't got better rates, yet you have many roaming users, it is time to plan for a review of your wireless telecoms spend. This should start with an early interview with your incumbent provider's account manager.

In negotiated custom corporate wireless contracts, market leading pricing for roaming usage tracks substantially below the regulated price caps. The significance of the roaming rates cannot be underestimated -- for many MNCs roaming spend can be 50% or more of their mobile costs. Hence, securing competitive rates for voice, data and SMS (texting) is crucial.

Determining whether you have good rates for voice, SMS and data might start with a look at the EU provided information on tariffs. The EU site will give you rates for roaming across Europe. Some might find it a useful starting point to see whether or not their negotiated rates are any better than standard supplier pricing.

Remember that this site is restricted to European countries and published rates. As good as it is to see efforts to provide more open information to consumers, spotting whether you are securing rates commensurate with your corporate spend is not in reality possible from the EU's site. But an interesting exercise is to click on the little timeline down the side of the rate tables and see the differences in prices over time. Immediately, it shows the continued downward trend in charges that telecoms managers should be seeking to emulate for their own contracts.

For one thing, it illustrates that operators really do need some help and encouragement to pass on price reductions to the consumer. Note particularly the drop in voice pricing in 2007 when EU regulation was first brought in! Would these have dropped so significantly without regulation?

For SMS and data, the recent step change down is initially likely to mean some stagnation in the rate of change, but in reality for most MNCs, the recent regulation should have a pull through effect on roaming data pricing. But negotiating improved SMS and data roaming rates in isolation may not be straightforward. Ideally, a structured competitive process will bring the greatest returns in terms of cost reduction, and typically the greatest opportunity for the provider to give you the best deal will be if you widen the scope of the procurement.

Mobile SMS and mobile access to the Internet and corporate networks are growing exponentially, and whilst the EU capping on roaming charges is very good news the caps should be regarded as the starting point for your negotiations, not the end.

It's earnings season on Wall Street, and the financial media flash revenues and earnings-per-share numbers on each reporting company. But most of the alerts I get from Wall Street telecom analysts instead highlight the internal figures for each major carrier, especially on the wireless side -- ARPU (average revenue per user per month), and churn (percentage of customers cancelling or leaving during the period).

Now that wireless is considered the main profit generator, the carriers have pretty much gotten the analysts used to rising ARPU and falling churn. The problem is that the drive toward constantly falling churn, while certainly admirable, has potentially negative side-effects.

That's one of the sources of the scare toward the end of last year over Verizon Wireless' hike in consumer early termination fees (ETFs) to as high as $350. In theory, there's nothing wrong with a certain base level of churn if it's caused by something other than dropped calls or bad customer service. Rollouts of new devices and next-generation networks obviously cause customers to look around for new options at a faster rate than before. So naturally, that occasionally leads them to change carriers. But that activity threatens Verizon's industry-leading 1.06% churn and, perhaps goaded by Wall Street, they want to stop it.

In business wireless contracts, Verizon's outsize ETFs don't apply to corporate-liable devices. But many companies rely on an overwhelming number of personal-liable devices to make their negotiated discount tiers with a carrier, in effect leaving their pricing at the mercy of independent users' reactions to carrier marketing.

Other business users are frustrated by lower but still onerous ETFs on a big pool of corporate-liable devices, and find negotiated offsets to be insufficient. One classic headache: "Pro-rated" ETFs that aren't truly pro rata -- say, a $5-per-month reduction in a $175 ETF on a 24-month contract (it would take 35 months to make such a concession a straight-line proration).

Effective ETF management reminds me of the problem of rate reviews in wireline contracts. While some carriers are trying to cut out rate reviews, some customers are trying out better alternatives such as term rather than annual commitments. Similarly, while a complete waiver of all ETFs was sometimes available to very large customers and is now more difficult to achieve, many companies are turning to waiver pools to get the right to end a set percentage of their corporate-liable lines every year without charge.

Still other companies with high turnover in certain business units implement policies that require re-use of individual lines, often combined with "suspend" or "seasonal" plans for the period between two employees' use of the line.

There's a real continuum of techniques here. That's why I like an 18-minute podcast that's available free in the "Telecom Junkies" series run by the folks at The Voice Report, because it describes a whole gamut of these tools.

The podcast, recorded in November and called "Savings Tips in Wake of VZW Termination Fee Hike," features among others LB3 partner Kevin DiLallo. Kevin is an occasional contributor on this blog, including recent notes about the IRS rules on personal cell phone usage and the text-message donation dilemma for corporate-billed devices. Kevin's advice is always practical and tuned to the needs of business users in particular situations. I encourage you to check out the podcast.

In the telecom industry, life is different when your name is AT&T.

Recent network difficulties that iPhone users have experienced in big cities such as New York and San Francisco are reminiscent of any number of past capacity and congestion incidents with AT&T services. So is AT&T's stated determination to furiously catch up -- and, in the current situation, also blunt Verizon's "war of the maps" 3G claims now that AT&T has dropped the legal attack on Verizon's ads.

Going back many years and generations of technology, AT&T has often given the impression of being constantly surprised by the popularity of the new services it brings to market. Incredibly, this tendency seems to carry over to whatever entity newly obtains the AT&T moniker as the makeup of the company changes.

Is there something about hanging the old "American Telephone & Telegraph" legacy around your neck that causes this phenomenon? Perhaps it's really because the AT&T brand is so powerful that it pulls in users beyond what the company originally plans for or, sometimes, merits.

During my time as a writer at Network World from 1994 to 2001, this kind of thing happened at least three times, and veteran telecom managers may remember all of these incidents:

-- AT&T was late to market on frame relay, having been beaten by the "first WilTel," an innovative carrier that later got sucked into the vortex of WorldCom mergers, and then by Sprint. AT&T executives had poor visibility into the popularity of the service, and within a year or two ran out of capacity and had to quickly order up more "Stratacom" (later Cisco) switches to catch up.

-- Later in the decade, AT&T management missed the speed of a trend by branch offices to move from switched to dedicated access. (Believe it or not, back then the only dedicated connection to interexchange carriers that even some sizable offices had was a 56K bit/sec frame relay link.) Rapid price-downs on dedicated-to-switched voice, plus growing data bandwidth demands, led many offices to finally order T1s. AT&T literally ran out of T1 ports in a number of POPs and had to hustle to recover.

-- Around the turn of the decade/century, capacity problems bedeviled the original, pre-Cingular AT&T Wireless network. This caused significant embarrassment for a veteran AT&T wireline executive who had lost a battle to become CEO of the main company -- that prize went to an outsider, Michael Armstrong, which is a whole other problematic story -- and who tried his hand at the wireless operation instead.

Make no mistake -- AT&T is responding now. In fact, AT&T's huge $18-$19 billion capital expenditures budget for 2010 includes a doubling of wireless network investment. That throws light on the capex-vs.-"free cash flow" paradox that we've highlighted as a key financial point in evaluating carriers. A modern-day carrier can almost never declare its networks "finished" and push away from the table.

There's another factor driving AT&T's situation besides capacity, and that's the urgency of the applications themselves. For significant portions of your end-user base, gone are the days when they considered mobility a second choice to fixed lines. We've noticed this in increasingly strict service management requirements demanded by enterprises in wireless competitive bidding -- device delivery, line activation, feature and call plan changes, that sort of thing.

Often telecom managers who do recognize the difference in maturity between wireline and wireless services say they're nevertheless driven to demand stricter wireless metrics by their end-user base. Not only AT&T but the other wireless carriers are learning this quickly as well.

And AT&T's 2009 earnings announced yesterday? They came in at $12.5 billion. And look at this: $17.1 billion in free cash flow even after capital expenditures. How about that?

Obviously there's no shame in asking for a great deal and a great network all at the same time -- even from, or especially from, the greatest legacy name in the telecom industry and one of the most enduring brand names in the history of business.