Controlling the Wireless Bite

Joel Larkin has a bit of historical perspective on the price of wireless communications.

Larkin, now the director of retail distribution for Plymouth-based wireless-services provider Select Communications, has been in the industry for more than a dozen years. He remembers when the cost of a wireless minute was almost too prohibitive for most businesses to consider. “Fifteen years ago, you paid between 40 and 70 cents a minute,” Larkin says. “I remember when 25 cents a minute was a great deal. Now you have unlimited nights and weekends. So on one hand, the price has come down. But at the same time, people are buying bigger buckets of minutes, so the costs are still rising.”

Containing those rising costs has become a conundrum for many companies. As wireless devices—from cellular phones to personal digital assistants such as PalmPilots and BlackBerrys—become both more common and more necessary in day-to-day business, the bills have mounted. Businesses in the United States now spend 25 percent of their total telecom budgets on wireless services, according to a report issued by The Yankee Group, a business research and consulting company based in Boston. For some businesses, that means millions of dollars.

You need to keep an eye on invoices for mysterious charges and billing glitches.

And there’s more to consider than cost per minute. Many companies find themselves dealing with multiple programs from multiple carriers, often paying different rates for different services. And how do you determine how many minutes to buy? If you plan for too few, you pay exorbitant overage fees; if you buy too many, you are paying more than necessary. There’s also the ever-present issue of how those minutes are being used—for business or personal calls. Managing all of that can become an administrative nightmare, tying up time and resources.

“Many organizations are pulling their hair out trying to get control of this,” says Mike Haigh, partner at Haigh, Todd & Associates, a telecommunications management firm in Minneapolis. “They just don’t know how to do it.”

Coverage Confusion

Although it would be ideal, Haigh says that in many cases it isn’t feasible for a company to get all the coverage it needs from one carrier. “It’s a necessary evil to have more than one carrier,” he says. “It all depends on coverage areas and services.”

Coverage issues are most problematic for those doing business in multiple states or countries or for those who travel for business. A service that works well in the upper Midwest may be unavailable in Texas, for example. International calling, meanwhile, is not provided by all carriers; with some, it can be both inconsistent and expensive. Even within Minnesota, coverage is inconsistent.