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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Tags: cost management