Statistical analysis of mobile phone price plans, carried out by a team of mathematicians at Oxford University, headed by Prof Chris Holmes and Dr Nicolai Meinshausen, revealed that there are currently 119,000 options to choose from.

A new British company, BillMonitor, employed the boffins to create a maths engine to analyse the figures. It then uses that data to match each consumer with the most efficient price plan for them. According to founder Stelios Koundouros, 88 per cent of users could save around 39 per cent of the costs on their phone bill, which equates to around £197 a year.

Its figures have been accredited for accuracy and impartiality in a six month study by auditors Analysis Mason for OFCOM.

Though OFCOM’s separate announcement (today) recognises that mobile consumers are over charged, it hasn’t been able to deal with the real problem to date, says Koundouros.

“With over a hundred thousand different variations of free minutes, texts, data transfers and operators, it’s small wonder that the consumer in the shop with ten minutes to make his mind up gets it wrong,” said Koundouros.

The challenge for consumers is that it’s difficult to get information from the mobile phone operators (Such as O2, Orange). “The information is scattered all over the place and not very easy to understand,” he said.

Koundouros was unable to say whether this is deliberate or not, but the upshot is the same. “The vast majority of people either buy free minutes they never use, pay for texts they’ll never send or exceed their call plan’s limits and unwittingly start paying for high premium calls.” The cost to the consumer, in nine cases out of ten, is just over £16 a month, on average.

Consumers use Bill Monitor by going online and submitting their online billing information. The system’s mathematical engine then analyses their call information, number crunches their call patterns, and then checks against its own database of 119,000 call plans to find the right supplier for you.

Consumers that are wary of putting their mobile billing details online can choose to type in the figures from their last bills (such as minutes used, texts sent, mobile roaming charges). The maths engine then builds a model predicting the type of user they are (based the pattern of information) and matches the best deal for that type of user.

The more information the consumer feeds in the better, says Koundouros. “When you go to an operator, and they look at your last bill, and match you up with one of their call plans, they don’t take into account the fact that everyone’s billing patterns change month by month. We take the monthly and seasonal variations into account n our calculations. And we don’t limit your options to one operator.”

Currently Bill Monitor only covers the big three mobile phone companies – Orange, O2 AND Vodafone – but it has plans to add T Mobile in the next three months.

The price comparison site is free to consumers, and makes its commission from the operators. Operators may be keen to take part as the emphasis has changed in the mobile industry. “The mobile operators know they’ll have to work harder to keep customers rather keep trying to win new ones,” said Mike Beech, at mobile charging analyst Acision, “it makes financial sense for them.”

Bill Monitor was set up in 2006 in response to the confusion over tariffs in the mobile phone industry. Following reports by both OFCOM (Mobile Sector Assessment) and Consumer Focus (Mobile What’s the Problem) It was funded by grants from the DTI, South East Regional Development and venture capitalist.


WEB SITE
www.billmonitor.com/mobile

FURTHER INFO
http://www.ofcom.org.uk/about/

problem with mobile