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.

Tags: cost management