Controlling Mobile Broadband Costs (Part 2)

Thursday, July 15th, 2010 Robert Kramer, VP Commercial Operations

Earlier, I provided a podcast on the opportunities in controlling mobile broadband costs. In the post, I included a summary of one opportunity – controlling the mobile broadband roaming expenses incurred when users travel internationally. You can be limited by a carrier’s low or bundled rates that you were offered.

The second area of mobile broadband cost control opportunity enabled by iPass Open Mobile relates to providing information which helps enterprises align mobile broadband users with the most cost effective price plan, based on the user’s individual mobile broadband usage patterns.

Many providers offer a range of mobile broadband packages which differ by price and included content. For example, a given provider may have a package allowing up to 200MB of use and another package allowing up to 5GB. The price difference between these packages can be as much as $20/month.

The ability to identify consistently lower volume users and assign them to a right-sized price plan represents a powerful opportunity for enterprise to optimize their mobile broadband expenditure.

iPass Mobile Insight is an easily mined data repository for historical mobile broadband usage information for each user. This information allows enterprises to readily identify end users who are underutilizing the data allowance of their current mobile broadband subscription plan and are candidates to be re-assigned to lower cost, lower content plans that may be available from the carrier. This data also helps identify users who are not actively using their mobile broadband service and for whom it may be cost effective to discontinue the service or assign the card to a different user.

View Transcript to get the entire story, including more on the first opportunity.

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Controlling Mobile Broadband Costs – Podcast

Monday, July 12th, 2010 Robert Kramer, VP Commercial Operations

Mobile broadband is becoming increasingly prevalent and represents a growing percentage of an enterprise’s overall connectivity spend. I recently recorded a podcast talking about ways to control these costs, which is below.

There are two main areas of opportunity for enterprises to control their mobile broadband costs. The first is controlling the mobile broadband roaming expenses incurred when users travel internationally. Many providers offer bundled packages which include an allocation of roaming content within a fixed monthly fee or roaming ‘day passes’ aimed at providing improved predictability of mobile broadband roaming costs. However, low or bundled roaming rates often only apply in certain geographies or on certain preferred roaming networks. Mobile broadband rates up to and exceeding $10 per megabyte remain prevalent.

  Podcast: Controlling Mobile Broadband Costs (2:40)

A single point of control can help manage mobile broadband roaming costs by allowing enterprises to create and enforce a wide range of mobile broadband usage policies. These include but are not limited to:

1. Only allowing mobile broadband roaming access for certain users.
2. Restricting all mobile broadband roaming in certain countries where costs are more expensive.
3. Only allowing mobile broadband roaming in certain markets or networks that are associated with a preferred network roaming plan the enterprise has purchased from the carrier.
4. Enforcing the use of a lower cost WiFi connection when such an option is available to the user.

Different policies may be defined and applied to different user groups, which provides enterprises with the maximum flexibility in implementing these policies.

My next post will cover the second area of mobile broadband cost control opportunity and give you the transcript of the podcast.

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