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April 2011 - Telecommunications

According to research by analyst company Billmonitor, 76% of British consumers have been overpaying by a total £5bn on their mobile bills by either having too small or too large an allowance for texts, data and calls by their service provider.
 
The importance of data allowances are becoming an increasing concern for users when choosing a tariff, with the study showing that £173 million had needlessly been spent in the UK on data that fell outside of allowances.

In its report, Billmonitor commented: “Calculations show it is rational for customers who are relatively heavy mobile internet users to move up their tariff level to increase their data allowance, even if the additional calling minutes are redundant.”

It added: “Data allowances can be set independently from minutes, but networks such as Orange and 3 (and to a lesser extent Vodafone and T-Mobile), still correlate these two allowances together.”

The majority of mobile broadband customers are staying within the usual monthly 500mb cap - the problem of data allowance is more an issue for heavy mobile internet users.
 
The research pointed out that clarity on how much data is being used by consumers to avoid overcharging is highly important.

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