BillMonitor

We’ve just updated the plans in the comparison engine to include some interesting new mobile deals. Orange have introduced 36 month (!) contracts. Whilst these may seem like good value – as little as £4.89 per month including a mobile – being locked into a 3 year contract could prove costly. The deals have quite small allowances (as low as 50 minutes) and the cost of calls outside that allowance is very high (20p/min) so if you want to call more than a little between now and 2012 you’ll be paying though the nose. On the other hand this deal sounds great for my gran, who needs a phone for emergencies but hates the hassle of topping up a pay-as-you-go phone.

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.

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.

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!

Three have recently announced that they plan to offer unlimited on-network calls and texts for just £15. Moving away from the cross-network minutes/texts template is pretty interesting, and while a lot of people won’t benefit from this (and, as such, I expect most price comparison sites will overlook it) some people will find that this plan is exactly what they’ve been waiting for.

Until now our system hasn’t compared SIM only plans. They’ve been on our to-do list for a while because they’re competitive and exciting, but we wanted to make sure that the plans we supported were up to scratch before we added more. Yesterday, I decided that now was the time to expand our horizons, so I began the task of adding 9,000 plan and bundle combinations to our already 38,000-strong database.

We’ve always expected our plan space to grow as the industry expands, so we’ve written the whole system with that in mind. I managed to throw in SIM only plans from 5 operators in just one morning, including grabbing a coffee or three, checking my newsreader, and double- and triple-checking all the rates to make sure that they’re perfect for our customers. They were up on our staging box by lunchtime, and that’s where they’ll stay until we’ve tested them both by hand and using mind-expanding statistics to ensure that they’re perfect.

The new plans aren’t available on the alpha yet, but if you’d like to know when they are and have a chance to test the future of mobile tariff price comparison, drop me a line at mac@optimorlabs.com and I’ll hook it up for you.