Wireless data plans are not what they appear to be

When a wireless carrier eliminates an unlimited data usage plan, and replaces it with a monthly data cap that it says covers ‘almost all users’, what does it really mean?

If the price of the capped plan is lower than the previous unlimited plan, the move can look generous. But carriers know that wireless data usage is growing exponentially. Rolling out 4G networks and putting smartphones in the hands of more and more corporate users will cause the number of transported bits to soar. So will increasing use of iPads. Soon a monthly data cap of, say, 2GB won’t look so generous any more.

Managed services deals can yield the best transport prices

The carriers’ desire to sell managed services is demonstrated by the aggressive transport services pricing that customers can get when buying transport and managed services at the same time.

But procuring and migrating to managed services can be daunting, with a huge range of technical, service management, human resource, commercial and legal issues.

If you don't know your traffic, you might as well tape a "kick me" sign on your backside

Would you blindly accept the balance shown on a restaurant check without thinking about what you ordered?

If you are sourcing telecom services and leave it to the carriers to determine the call volumes and circuit quantities in their proposals, you are in basically saying “the waiter is always right.”
 
Carriers may select a sample month with unusually high volumes that, when annualized, overstate savings. They may omit or misclassify international terminating call volumes or include MPLS ports that you plan to disconnect in a month. To maintain control of the procurement process, you have to “know your traffic.”

To save money on VOIP, know where the savings are

SIP Trunking has emerged as the industry standard for carrier VoIP products, allowing customers to replace legacy voice trunks and services with VoIP on their data circuits.

   
But sometimes companies are surprised when they receive SIP Trunking pricing proposals and see a charge for each “concurrent call channel,” and even per-minute charges for long distance calls. What’s going on here? Isn’t VoIP supposed to be “free,” or at least relieved of per-minute metering?

Sourcing wireless is about good deals, not winning "Boss of the Month"

You could win a popularity contest by picking the smartphone your employees are all clamoring for. But that would limit your choice of suppliers and hurt your chance to get a good deal.

So what do you do? Recognize that the wireless market is constantly changing, and your wireless procurement is designed to give you and your end-users options they can live with (or choose from) for at least a couple of years. It’s not about the hot item of the moment.

An effective commitment
beats a no-commitment deal

For years, telecom deals have been built on the idea of a Minimum Annual Commitment. But in an era of recession and shifting voice traffic, CIOs and telecom managers are increasingly wary of MACs.

They’ve discovered that the closer the MAC is to the actual amount of spend, the less negotiating leverage the company has going forward. Many of them are searching for – or demanding – the Holy Grail of the No-Commitment Deal. But there’s always a price to be paid.

 
Carriers use pricing to signal obsolescence

Enterprises often wonder when a trusted service based on a familiar technology will be turned off by their carrier.

This fear has been stoked by an AT&T move that appeared to ask the government for permission to schedule retirement of the legacy telephone network.

Keep wireless service
early termination fees
far from user pools

Verizon charges individual subscribers $350 for early termination of a smartphone contract, and AT&T charges $325.

Some companies think that if they negotiate a “lower price” for their wireless Early Termination Fees (ETFs), they’ve done an adequate job.

Wrong.

Don't forget Orange
and BT in your
global RFPs

Automatically giving your growing international business to your main domestic U.S. carrier is a recipe for high prices. But selecting a different international carrier is a minefield for most users.

Few of the many other carriers around the world truly have meaningful global networks. Often their “global” footprint is almost entirely made up of capacity leased from other carriers outside their home territories. And they frequently have Points of Presence on various continents only in the very largest cities, while even medium-sized U.S. businesses now need connectivity in secondary cities.

Finding the billing error is easy.  Fixing it can be tough.

Claims for billing errors are rarely as simple as "the carrier is billing 3 cents per minute even though the contract says 2 cents per minute."

The root causes can depend on whether certain waivers apply, whether custom pricing is being correctly applied, or whether a particular discount applies in conjunction with another discount. If there's room for doubt, or the contract is less than crystal clear (as supplier-drafted contracts usually are), suppliers will push back on a recovery claim.

It's okay to shed a tear for frame relay

Continue on to our blog to find out what this is all about.