For companies with a high number of mobile-device users, figuring out what mobile plans to buy is not necessarily as straightforward as it might appear on the surface. A company might need to utilize different carriers for geographic coverage reasons, for example -- and then need to know which plans in a given carrier are right for each user. Many companies attempt to solve this problem by simply buying unlimited data plans for all users -- but there are cost inefficiencies with this strategy that, when amplified across all of the mobile accounts in a company, can end up costing companies far more than it should.
Unlimited Mobile Plans: Not Truly Unlimited
There are two primary reasons why putting all employees on an unlimited plan often doesn’t make sense. In the first instance, it’s likely that many employees simply do not need unlimited data -- and thus, the company is stuck paying for far more capacity than they need. The second reason, which is typically a little harder to identify, is that unlimited data plans are not truly unlimited in every sense. That is, when a user exceeds a certain data threshold, the carrier will start to throttle the data speed for that user -- and if the user truly needs that much data to perform their work, they’re now faced with a built-in slowdown in data that can only lead to inefficiencies that compromise them in the performance of their work.
So what’s a company to do when some of its workers truly do need unlimited data to best perform their jobs?
Mobile Connection Pooling
The answer lies in the concept of mobile connection pooling, which we’ve previously talked about in a piece on why companies are very often billing back mobile bills to the wrong cost centers. Essentially, mobile connection pooling allows a company to buy a fixed amount of data for each mobile user. Some users will use less than their allotment of data, and that unused data goes back into the pool and is available for use by users who have used more than their allotment.
By figuring out how much data is used, and by whom, it’s possible to purchase the right balance of plans so that there’s enough excess in the pool for all users, even those who need to consume a lot. It’s a process that saves money by only buying the plans that are needed while at the same time avoiding high-cost -- and potentially throttled -- unlimited plans.
There is, however, a special case for when companies may actually want to put some of their users on unlimited plans: When a user is consuming large amounts of data, but they don’t actually need to in the performance of their jobs, a company can intentionally put them on an unlimited plan precisely because their usage will be throttled when it becomes excessive.
Art vs. Science in Mobile Plan Purchasing
Figuring out which plans to buy for the pool might seem like an art -- but it’s very much a science, and it’s a science that we apply on behalf of our customers every month as we manage their plans and pooling. Our system is built to constantly analyze trends and usage across an entire mobile fleet, so that we’re always buying mobile plans for our customers in the most optimal way possible.
We often save our customers more than $10 per month per device on their mobile bills with this service. Across time and a large number of mobile devices, those savings add up quickly -- and are in addition to the savings our customers realize by not having to spend their own time and resources figuring it all out for themselves.
If you’d like to see how it would work for you, we’re happy to show you. We’ll do a free (yes, free) and no-obligation audit of your most recent three months of mobile bills, and then show you exactly how much you could be saving each month.
