* Taming international mobile phone costs
When users with GSM phones working for U.S.-based multinational companies travel overseas, they could unwittingly rack up all kinds of premium charges.
The reason is the generally disjointed nature of the service plans many businesses have in place. If you consider your international travelers as exceptions to the mobile masses in your company, you’ve likely optimized your sourcing for those who remain domestically mobile. As a result, the international traveler often pays full price when out of the country.
One “Wireless in the Enterprise” reader who runs a multinational network has been hit with the unexpected “big bill” numerous times. He advises that if you have corporate offices in the countries where users travel, encourage them to use the corporate network and service plan whenever they are in the office — say, for checking voicemail messages.
Charges can run from $.99 to $5.29 per minute to check voicemail, depending on the country. My source says one traveler in France for three weeks checked his voicemail once per hour from his mobile phone, racking up $270 just to retrieve messages.
Perhaps a more frightening situation was a user visiting Vietnam for two weeks who ran up 1,200 minutes of usage on his cell phone – to the tune of $6,348. In some countries you pay to both make and receive a call, so it helps if users know the lay of the land before they arrive.
My source also recommends disabling services that send automatic Short Messaging Service (SMS) messages to users’ mobile devices when they travel internationally. The cost of each received message can be up to 50 cents. If a user receives automatic stock updates every 15 minutes for eight hours a day when on the road, that can be $16 per day or $80 per week.
Some of the worldwide mobile network operators have “bolt-on” plans for a few dollars a month per user that buys them fixed per-minute prices in Europe. It’s also possible that worldwide network service aggregators, such as iPass and Fiberlink, which have been recently adding 3G cellular to their array of offerings, can resell you a more predictably priced set of worldwide mobile services.
