BillMonitor

Vodafone and Apple today confirmed that they have reached agreement to offer iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS in the UK in early 2010.  This announcement follows on the heels of Orange’s own announcement yesterday that they would be joining O2 in offering the iPhone in the UK, bringing the total number of operators offering the iPhone in the UK to three.  Our office speculates that T-Mobile may soon offer the iPhone to its customers as well due to their merger with Orange.

The Telegraph reports rumours that Virgin Mobile are also attempting to secure the right to sell the iPhone.

Competition for iPhone customers may lower the price of an iPhone plan; in foreign markets with multiple operators offering the device, the cost of an iPhone contract was lowered by around £5/month.

We now cluster similar plans together on our results page in order to provide you with an even better spectrum of deals. You’ll see this in the form of a button beneath certain plans offering you a selection of similar tariffs. These might offer you a different set of bundles that we consider to be interchangeable or they might offer you a different allowance of minutes/texts that won’t alter how much the plan costs you under your specified usage.

Now you can not only see which tariff is best for you, but where you can get it for the cheapest price.  This is possible because we now compare tariffs and handsets from Phones4U and Mobiles.co.uk, bringing the latest release of our mobile price comparison site up to an incredible 6.8 million mobile deals.

These stores often offer free gifts with tariffs, and we’ve included those too. Currently we pick the gift for you based on which provides the highest straight-up monetary value. In our next update, we’ll be providing a choice of gifts, so if you’re set on that free Playstation 3, we’ll be able to help you out.

In addition to the new deals, we’ve sped up the site significantly. We hope that you’ll notice the difference! We’ve also been working hard under the hood to prepare the system for even more tariffs. The mobile market is an incredibly complicated place, and we’re just getting started!

While monitoring the millions of ever-changing mobile deals available, here at BillMonitor we get a pretty good idea of the scope of the UK mobile market, so naturally we’re interested in this.

OFCOM (the independent regulator for mobile in the UK) is trying to make sense of it all in its upcoming ‘Mobile Sector Assessment’. Their aim is to see what can be done to make mobile better for all of us – consumer confidence in mobile is lower than all other services considered in a report conducted for the government last June. In preparation OFCOM released a consultation report with a series of questions that have been investigated over the last year. In the consultation they highlighted some key issues:

Tariff confusion:
According to OFCOM only 15% of consumers find it ‘very easy’ to choose a contract. This isn’t surprising to BillMonitor: maintaining our comprehensive tariff and bundle information is serious work – tariff information is unstandardised, with bundle information scattered across many network’s webpages, and with much of the details only in small print terms and conditions. We think that having a choice between over 100,000 tariffs is a good thing – it means there is a tariff out there that is great for you – but an unclear choice is no choice.

These factors can lead to consumers being on a more expensive contract than is right for them. We see the effects of these problems in our results, as almost every one who uses our bill assessment could be on a significantly better tariff. In fact, we’ve been busy number-crunching to find out exactly how much people should be saving – the results will be in our interim mobile price index report, some of which makes for some eye-watering reading.

Billing and cost clarity:
Both the OFCOM consultation and a recent report by Consumer Focus talk of the hidden costs in billing. Often operators charge for itemised paper bills, even though without itemised billing it is impossible to see where your money is being spent. Different networks bill the same types of calls in inconsistent ways such as (depending on the network) rounding up calls, deferring charges and excluding voicemail from your inclusive allowances. BillMonitor takes these kind of things into account when working out the best tariff – but we often have to phone up the networks to find out exactly how much a certain type of call will cost. Compounding this is the fact the each network presents their bill differently and with varying levels of detail.

Ease of switching:
The current economic situation is making many mobile users think about switching. A recent survey by Booz & Company found that 43% are considering changing to a cheaper contract. Switching mobile network while keeping your number should be easy – you just get a PAC code from your old network and give it to your new one. It’s never quite that simple though; one of the BillMonitor team recently spent 45 minutes being bounced around a call centre, finally being put on silent hold for 10 minutes before he finally managed to get a PAC! Even though most BillMonitor users still save when they switch to a better tariff with their current network, consumers should be allowed to move to a good deal on a different network without this hassle.

Problems like these are exactly the reason why we created BillMonitor and we’re looking forward to see what OFCOM has to say.

In an absolutely massive move, Vodafone have announced that they’re planning to cut roaming prices down to local rates right across Europe. You can read the full press release at Mobile Industry Review or check out the official Vodafone site, although at the time of writing there’s nothing more than a placeholder there.

In summary, Vodafone Passport customers (And that’s anyone on Vodafone, as long as you opt in to it for free) will be able to use their phone to call and text the UK for the same prices as at home in 35 countries across Europe. As long as you’re calling back home, the free minutes and texts from your plan will apply. This all kicks in on the 1st June and runs through to the end of August.

On top of that, international calls will fall to as little as 5p per minute for pay as you go users from 15th May.

This is sure to leave most networks in the dust for big international users. Will any other networks step forward and attempt to compete?

It’s easy to forget just how expensive out of allowance calls are, but when you do the maths, it becomes clear. At best, you’ll pay 10p per minute for a mobile call out of allowance. How much do your in allowance minutes cost? Well, take, for example, Three’s 300 mix and match tariff. You get 300 minutes (assuming you just use calls) for £15. That’s 5p per minute of calling – half the price of a call made outside allowance. Therefore, if you make 450 minutes of calls, you’ll get a bill for £30! If you’d have gone for the £18 500 minute tariff, you’d still have 50 minutes to spare before you had to start paying for calls.

No matter which network you choose, it’s always worth thinking about choosing a larger tariff if you’re likely to go over the limit regularly.

Last week T-Mobile re-designed their Flext tariff to appeal to higher end users, boasting a huge £100 a month tariff and massive allowances. If you’re looking for a high-priced tariff with huge allowances, you might see the larger Flext plans popping up on your searches.

The world of contract mobile broadband is, mercifully, a little simpler than the pay as you go options. Every major network will give you a USB modem for free and a monthly allowance in gigabytes, and away you go. Beware, however, because there are a few gotchas to this whole thing: first, those free laptops aren’t always as free as they appear. If you’re going to be going for a £30 plan anyway, then yes, you might benefit, but don’t forget to check out the price of buying the laptop separately before you dive in, because often you’ll find yourself paying a hell of a lot more than you would if you’d just ordered it online and gone for a dongle instead. For this reason I’m not going to consider laptops, because here we’re all about saving money! Second, unlike phone tariffs, you often don’t gain a lot by taking a longer contract, so always consider taking a shorter contract if you’re not going to lose out on it. No-one likes being tied in!

Let’s start with Vodafone. £15 per month of your hard-earned cash gets you 3 gigabytes of data, and taking a 24 month contract will get you £5 off for the first 3 months. 5 gigabytes will set you back £25. If your heart is set on a ‘free’ laptop, you’ll pay £25 a month for 1 gigabyte of usage.

T-Mobile’s prices are almost identical: £15 for 3 gigabytes of usage, and 5gb for £30. It’s worth noting thst T-Mobile use a “fair usage” policy instead of an allowance, so if you go over it, you might find your net access locked down but you won’t get charged any extra. Again, there’s a laptop on offer.

O2 provide a reduced-VAT £14.69 price for 3 gigabytes, with 4 months of cheaper rental thrown in for the 24 month users. A huge 10 gigabyte allowance will cost you £30 – oh, wait, sorry, £29.38.

Orange offers a 1 gigabyte plan for low usage customers, but if you don’t buy online they’ll be a bit tight and charge you for the USB modem. It’s £9.79 a month for that, or £14.68 for 3 gigabytes. They also do a great value 10 gigabyte plan at £24.47 a month.

Three weigh in with a cheap cheap 1 gig for £10 plan, throwing in a free modem for anyone on an 18 or 24 month plan. If you want to go for 12 months it’ll cost you £48.93 to get set up. 3 gigabytes will cost you £15 a month for 12 months, and for the same price, you’ll get 5 gigabytes if you go for an 18 or 24 month contract. 7 gigabytes will set you back £25, and 15 gigabytes, the biggest plan on offer, will cost you £30.

That wraps up the choices on offer. Click through to the network sites if you want more information, or drop us an email and we’ll see if we can help.

If you do decide to go for that netbook, you may want to consider building it into a robot that can bring you popcorn.

BillMonitor doesn’t support mobile broadband services yet, but they’re becoming very popular, so when a friend of mine asked me which was the best deal out there I thought I’d do my service to mankind and post a run-down of the pay as you go broadband services around.

Vodafone kick us off with a good deal if you’re looking for short term use: £39 for the USB modem, including one gigabyte of data. As soon as you want to use more than that, however, it gets pretty expensive, at £15 per gigabyte. Head over to the Vodafone site for more details.

Orange improve on that a little, with a £48.50 up-front cost for the modem followed by £19.57 for 3 gigabytes of usage. Orange operates on a 30 day contract, so if you don’t use your data in that time, it’s gone. If you’re a heavier user, £29.36 will get you 10 gigabytes for the 30 days. Check out the Orange site for more details.

Three round off the normal deals with a £48.93 modem and £10 for 1 gigabyte, again valid for 30 days. £15 will get you 3 gigabytes, and £25 gets you 7gb. Head over to Three’s site to buy.

t-Mobile and o2 take a different tactic – you can choose to buy an allowance for a day, a week, or a month, depending on how much you think you’ll use it. O2 will set you back £29.35 for the modem, and then £2 a day, £7.50 a week, or £15 for a month. Be warned if you’re high usage though – the allowances are extremely low compared to other networks, at 500 megabytes for the daily package, a gigabyte for the week, and 3 gigabytes if you opt for the monthly option. O2’s package is available here.

By contrast, T-Mobile have a huge 3 gigabyte per day fair usage policy on their packages, and will set you back £42.54 for the modem followed by £1.70 a day, or £8.51 a week, or £17.02 for 30 days. For both light and heavy users this is likely to be the best choice if you’re not willing to move up to a contract. T-Mobile’s mobile internet options can be found here.

Want to know about the contract options? Check back next week.

Yesterday, Jonathan Jensen tweeted that 3 offered his son an awesomely cheap £8 a month tariff when renewing his contract, and even dug out an old, discontinued tariff for him.  Seems like they’ll do anything to keep their customers in these difficult times!

When I switched from Orange to O2 they didn’t even try and stop me – I guess pay as you go customers aren’t all that important to them!