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On June 16, 2009 representatives from US mobility carriers, AT&T and Verizon testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee's antitrust subcommittee. The testimony centered on concerns that the four largest cell phone companies had doubled their text message rates from 10 cents in 2006 to 20 cents in 2008.It is no secret that text messaging is highly profitable...

Last fall, shortly after Senator Herb Kohl (D-Wisc.), the subcommittee chairman, sent letters to AT&T, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile USA and Verizon asking them to justify raising rates on "by-the-drink" text messages, the carriers were hit with lawsuits claiming the carriers conspired on pricing for text-messaging. Verizon's Randall Milch, in his testimony, said there was no collusion or price-fixing indicating that there was a great deal of variation in the four carriers' prices for these messages for prepaid customers:

• Verizon charges 1 cent, 5 cents or 10 cents per message, depending upon the plan.
• AT&T charges 20 cents per message.
• Sprint charges 10 cents per message (or can have all of their text messages included for free, depending upon the plan).
• T-Mobile charges 5 cents per message on incoming messages, and 10 cents per message on outgoing messages.

 

Wayne Watts, general counsel for AT&T also made the point that the vast majority of AT&T's customers do not choose single pricing for text messaging services among AT&T and Verizon subscribers only 17% use this "pay-per-use" service plan. 

Who are those poor souls that are paying these crazy rates for text messaging? Surely they don't work for your company... or do they?

Optimization of wireless mobility expenses starts with moving employees from a corporate liable plan to an employee liable plan. Unfortunately, with the economic downturn many enterprises have tried to move in the opposite direction. A common misconception centers on the belief that there are savings from cutting program expenses associated with managing mobility expenses. These savings are usually overtaken by the high costs associated with employees that are not on an optimized wireless mobility plan. The savings from combining employees into a pool to avoid exceeding a monthly allotment is significant. Also simply establishing a preferred provider and having most employees call each other on the same network will reduce business minutes that are consumed each month. Many firms have employees that are on unlimited plans when they could be saving money by moving employees into pools.Also when it comes to international travel, enterprises must have a plan. 

 

Once again, our legislators have proved that they can find a flash point issue of rapidly growing costs for mobility, but it appears to me that there are better approaches to address this issue. I am not going to weigh in on the antitrust issue. it seems to me that the government is taking advantage of concerns regarding the fast growing wireless expenses. If they really wanted to help us, they would eliminate all the taxes that are levied on wireless billing by local, state, and federal entities.

 

What do you think? Should enterprise employees even be using text messaging?

  

 

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