* Pooled contracts yield greater savings for large companies
In a domino-like manner, starting with Verizon Wireless, the major U.S. mobile network operators recently created all-you-can-eat voice plans for about 100 bucks a month. Given that many businesses now strike mobile contracts for pooled minutes of usage enterprise-wide, how beneficial will these plans actually be?
“I like having options,” the telecom manager of a nationwide manufacturing company told me. “And it’s a good plan if you only have 20 users and they each talk 2000 minutes per month.”
However, this particular company has aggregated its 500 enterprise-wide users onto a Verizon Wireless pooled-minutes plan that translates into the least-expensive minimum plan per user per month. Doing the math, he says, the newly announced flat rates come out to “about $60 more per month per user than I pay now.”
Pooled plans offer a flat monthly fee for a total number of minutes that are shared by users throughout the enterprise. For budgeting purposes, you can divide the monthly fee by the number of users to get a per-user price. However, one user might theoretically consume no minutes while another might consume thousands of minutes in a given month, while the per-month fee to the business remains the same.
The network manager of a global consumer products company added: “For anyone managing wireless of any scale, this type of plan doesn’t make any sense. We buy 1.2 million minutes per month from AT&T and our pool efficiency is about 93%,” he said, meaning that the company pays very little in per-minute plan overages and wastes very few purchased minutes.
The network manager acknowledged that one potentially enticing aspect to the flat-fee voice plans would be in a case where there’s a “one-off user” who can’t be supported by the business’s primary mobile carrier because the quality of the local wireless coverage isn’t up to snuff. Having to turn to a secondary carrier for an a la carte plan for such users could be economical, if they consume high volumes of minutes, he said.
