What you need to know about the costs of mobility

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010 Karen Ambrose Hickey, Editor

Last week, on my train from NYC to DC, I was excited to see laptops out in the snack car. I hadn’t seen signs about Wi-Fi. I asked a fellow passenger, and while doing so, spotted the 3G card. “Ah, 3G.” I’m not in the “segment” in my company to have one. Plus I was on vacation. Sadly, I headed back to my book, but also thought that a 3G card would probably be wasted on me; now knowing how the costs for these can add up. And if you lose it? No problem! IT just gives you another, right?

In our recently released survey, we discovered that 35% of enterprises rarely (if ever) audit their mobile connectivity costs (more on that in a later post). So we put together some tips that you need to know about the costs of mobility. Here are some ideas for near-term financial impact. Our whitepaper covers these in more depth, along with other cost-reduction opportunities. And it’s free advice and perfect for your summer reading shelf. Or while on the train.

1.  Avoid international roaming charges – This is more than just “not traveling.”

• Get real-time alerts and reports – “warning, warning, she is roaming!”
• Detect and disable roaming connections
• Use a multi-technology mobile access network to take advantage of free Wi-Fi and local carriers

2. Reallocate under-used 3G subscriptions – 30-50% of these cards are not used

• Get utilization reports that identify accounts with no activity
• Set up under-use alerts
• Shift less active users to Wi-Fi only access

3. Megabyte offload – the industry will shift to usage-based pricing

• Record, analyze and segment your consumption patterns by user and business unit
• Set up policies to alert and manage high bandwidth applications and usage (try to avoid that $27,000 pay-per-view)
• Use technology to find and move users to lower cost connections

4. Carrier plan negotiation and optimization

• Analyze and forecast usage and non-usage trends for better plan selection
• Use data to re-negotiate

For more details, take a look at our whitepaper called “What You Need to Know About the Costs of Mobility“.

Tags: cost management, enterprise mobility