BillMonitor Consumer Mobile Factsheet

85.2% of consumers can save an average of £199 per year on their mobile tariff

26 million UK mobile contract users could make £4.3 billion in savings

BillMonitor has analysed 2190 anonymised monthly bills from consumers using its online mobile bill assessment service in the last few months. The bills analysed are from consumers on contract with O2, Orange, Vodafone and T-Mobile. Using its comprehensive market database, BillMonitor has calculated how much each consumer’s bill would be across 8,903,546 mobile deals1 available to UK consumers (including add-ons and bundles). By comparing the bills a consumer would pay on each different tariff, BillMonitor is able to find out how much each consumer could save.

[ For more information, see http://www.billmonitor.com/mobile/how-it-works ]

Most consumers are on the wrong plan for their usage

82% of the users seen by BillMonitor have mobile plans with inclusive minutes which are never fully used, therefore switching to a more suitable plan could make significant savings. Indeed 49.6% of users are using less than half of their included allowance – the average number of unused minutes per month is 316.

The above figure derived by BillMonitor from actual UK user billing data shows that the under-utilisation of price plans is substantially more pronounced than users are aware of – as reported by Ofcom2 , only 40% of mobile users think their plan has more minutes than they use.

BillMonitor finds large savings – 85.2% of consumers can save an average of £199/year

85.2% of BillMonitor users save money by switching to the tariff most suitable for them – an average saving of £16.60 a month – that’s £199 a year! In percentage terms, the average mobile contract user seen by BillMonitor saves 40.2% on deals that include a free phone.

  • If they are willing to keep their existing handset then 91% save £216 per year on average (£18.05 per month) using a SIM-only tariff.
  • Extrapolating across the 26 million UK mobile contract users, that equates to £4.3 billion of savings that will go straight back into their pockets each year.
  • If everyone used BillMonitor to find their ideal tariff, the UK average monthly bill would drop from £36.41 to £24.01.
Getting the right contract for you is key – you can still save with your current network
  • 57% of BillMonitor users save £156.24 per year (£13.02 per month) by getting on the right tariff with their current network.
  • If they keep their current phone 88% save £199.68 per year (£16.64 per month) on their current network.
Characteristics of UK mobile usage

The average monthly mobile bill seen by BillMonitor is £36.41, most of this (£26.31) being the monthly contract price, with the rest taken up by the cost of chargeable mobile usage3.

Taking into account all voice calls made by BillMonitor users plus the entire cost of having a phone, we found that:

  • cost per call for the average mobile contract user4 is 65.6p, and the cost per minute 24p
  • number of monthly voice calls for the average mobile contract user is 80 calls totaling 220 minutes
Notes on methodology and differences to Ofcom’s Communications Market report

By using its unique bill assessment service, BillMonitor is able to calculate statistics at the individual user level, whereas Ofcom calculates statistics at the population level. It is of course at the individual level that we receive our bills.

For example, regarding the cost per call and cost per minute calculations detailed above, in its Communications Market report, Ofcom aggregates the total costs paid across all users and divides this number by the total minutes used by all users. BillMonitor, however, can take each (anonymised) user in turn and divide the cost incurred by each by the minutes they used, and then look at the average of these individual-focussed statistics across the entire population.

Note: if instead of calculating the cost/min for the average user, we divided the total costs paid by all users by the minutes used by all users (as Ofcom does), the per minute cost would be 15p and the cost per call 45p.

Report from Booz & Company5

“A quarter of the 1,800 British consumers surveyed said they may stop using their mobile phone altogether, while 45 percent said they will consider delaying the purchase of a new mobile phone and 43 percent said they would switch to a cheaper mobile contract.”

1 Tariffs compared on billmonitor 1st March 2010

2 Source: Ofcom 2008 report: http://www.ofcom.org.uk/research/cm/cmr08/cmr08_2.pdf

3 Excluding non-usage costs such as insurance

4 See notes on methodology below for an explanation of how this calculation contrasts with reports such as the Ofcom Communications report.

5 ref: http://uk.reuters.com/article/UK_SMALLCAPSRPT/idUKLC71927120090512