BillMonitor

The latest release of our mobile price comparison site brings us up to an incredible 6.8 million mobile deals. This is possible because we now compare tariffs and handsets from Phones4U and Mobiles.co.uk, so you can not only see which tariff is best for you, but where you can get it for the cheapest price.

These stores often offer free gifts with tariffs, and we’ve included those too. Currently we pick the gift for you based on which provides the highest straight-up monetary value. In our next update, we’ll be providing a choice of gifts, so if you’re set on that free Playstation 3, we’ll be able to help you out.

In addition to the new deals, we’ve sped up the site significantly. We hope that you’ll notice the difference! We’ve also been working hard under the hood to prepare the system for even more tariffs. The mobile market is an incredibly complicated place, and we’re just getting started!

We’ve just updated the plans in the comparison engine to include some interesting new mobile deals. Orange have introduced 36 month (!) contracts. Whilst these may seem like good value - as little as £4.89 per month including a mobile - being locked into a 3 year contract could prove costly. The deals have quite small allowances (as low as 50 minutes) and the cost of calls outside that allowance is very high (20p/min) so if you want to call more than a little between now and 2012 you’ll be paying though the nose. On the other hand this deal sounds great for my gran, who needs a phone for emergencies but hates the hassle of topping up a pay-as-you-go phone.

It’s super hot here in BillMonitor Towers!

Vodafone’s Summer promo started yesterday, so now Vodafone customers can enjoy roaming phone calls at no extra cost, as long as they’re on Passport. We had a think about how to model this in our system and we decided that if we removed the 75p cost per call, you’d get stung when September came along and the cost was added again. Therefore, the prices shown in BillMonitor continue to reflect the full cost.

This promotion is an excellent deal for the Summer, and we hope that lots of our customers can save money with it, but we don’t want you to sign up for a contract that’s going to work out more expensive for you in the long run.

Thanks to everyone who has sent in a host of fantastic feedback over the last few days! It’s amazing to see that so many people are finding the system useful.

At the time of writing, pay as you go tariffs are currently the number one request from users on our feedback page. We are listening, and we hope to get these in soon. It takes a little longer to add new plans to our system because of the level of detail in which we describe them, but we are working flat out to add in the plans and smaller operators that we currently do not support.

Over the next week or so we’re going to make improvements to the system, incorporating some feedback and points picked up by our eagle-eyed users. For example, we’re adding in Three’s SIM Only plans, and we’ve made sure that ITS is correctly given to all of O2’s iPhone plans for free.

Following our OFCOM announcement we’ve had a massive influx of new traffic. Hello to all of you! We’re really, really happy to see our site getting so much attention (Mrs Monitor is ecstatic, she loves the limelight!) but with it comes a whole heap of new challenges. A lot of you have information in your phone bills that we’ve never seen before so it’s going to take us some time to teach the system about all the new kinds of calls that it is seeing.

Most people who use the site won’t even notice that we’re busy, but for some of you, the site might slow down and your assessments might take a long time to get back to you. We’re really sorry about this and we’re working super hard to make sure that this happens for as few people as possible. If you’re unhappy with any part of our service, drop us a line on twitter or email us at feedback@billmonitor.com and we’ll do our best to get back to you.

BillMonitor announces accreditation by Ofcom

BillMonitor is the first mobile price comparison service to be accredited by Ofcom

Oxford, UK, 21^st May 2009 - BillMonitor, a new price comparison tool for UK mobile users, today becomes the first UK mobile price comparison service to be accredited by Ofcom. The site uses advanced statistics developed by BillMonitor’s team of mathematicians with scientific advisors from Oxford University to identify the best price plan for consumers based on their individual usage patterns. According to research from BillMonitor, 88% of users can save an average of 39% on their mobile phone bill.

The UK mobile market offers consumers more than three million deals on over 119,078 tariffs. With such a broad choice and the complexity of offers available, the need for impartial, personalised mobile advice is stronger than ever.

BillMonitor’s Interim Mobile Price Index analysed hundreds of actual users’ online bills, illustrating that most consumers are on the wrong plan for their usage patterns. For example, 82% are on plans with inclusive minutes they don’t use. BillMonitor simplifies the complicated mobile market to empower customers by clearly showing them how and where they could make savings:

• 88% of BillMonitor users save money by switching to the tariff most suitable for them – an average saving of £16.46 a month – that equates to £197 a year
• Extrapolating across the 26 million UK mobile contract users, that equates to £4.09 billion of savings
• Most users could upgrade to an iPhone for just £2.70 more per month than they are already paying for their current contract handset

BillMonitor’s service includes:

• Online bill tracking: Consumers supply their online billing account details and BillMonitor automatically analyses their online bills for a tailored and accurate recommendation based on analysis of their usage patterns
• One-off tariff search: Users can enter the number of minutes and texts they use per month, as well as overseas calls, picture messaging and data usage to locate the most appropriate tariff for consumers’ usage patterns

“Science has been put to work for struggling consumers in a free service to help them lower their bills,” said Stelios Koundouros, Co-founder, BillMonitor. “BillMonitor helps people to save money on their mobile phone bills by providing them with accurate information to empower them to make confident purchase decisions.”

Established by a team of mathematicians and scientific advisors, Prof Chris Holmes and Dr Nicolai Meinshausen, from the University of Oxford, BillMonitor provides a very practical application of complex statistics; championing the desire of consumers to save money, especially important in uncertain economic times.  The service analyses historical usage patterns, predicts future behaviour and suggests the best mobile price plans with a high degree of certainty that individuals will see real savings. The science behind the service is based on research funded by an R&D grant from the Department of Trade and Industry in statistical decision technology.

For more information on BillMonitor, please see: www.billmonitor.com

- Ends-

Approved by OFCOM

About BillMonitor

BillMonitor was founded by Dr. Stelios Koundouros, Professor Chris Holmes and Dr. Nicolai Meinshausen based on research funded by an R&D grant from the Department of Trade and Industry in statistical decision technology.  BillMonitor.com is operated by Optimor Ltd, a company registered in England with offices at 10 Mayfield Road, Oxford, OX2 7EL. Optimor is backed by The Accelerator Group and Finance South East.

For more information please contact:

Georgina Bonner / Alexis Dalrymple

Billmonitor@hotwirepr.com

Tel: 020 7608 2500 / +44 (0) 7739 333 288

Today we launched the latest feature from our maths laboratory: the safest plan badge!

We always try to recommend the best plan to our users, and we do take into account that your usage will change from month to month, but it’s not always clear how much room a plan gives you to make extra calls. Calling outside your allowance can end up very expensive, so we decided to mark out the safest plan.

We put the safest plan marker on whichever plan provides you with the most room in its allowances to make up for those extra calls that you can’t predict. It won’t always be the cheapest plan, but it might be the best choice.

While monitoring the millions of ever-changing mobile deals available, here at BillMonitor we get a pretty good idea of the scope of the UK mobile market, so naturally we’re interested in this.

OFCOM (the independent regulator for mobile in the UK) is trying to make sense of it all in its upcoming ‘Mobile Sector Assessment’. Their aim is to see what can be done to make mobile better for all of us - consumer confidence in mobile is lower than all other services considered in a report conducted for the government last June. In preparation OFCOM released a consultation report with a series of questions that have been investigated over the last year. In the consultation they highlighted some key issues:

Tariff confusion:
According to OFCOM only 15% of consumers find it ‘very easy’ to choose a contract. This isn’t surprising to BillMonitor: maintaining our comprehensive tariff and bundle information is serious work - tariff information is unstandardised, with bundle information scattered across many network’s webpages, and with much of the details only in small print terms and conditions. We think that having a choice between over 100,000 tariffs is a good thing - it means there is a tariff out there that is great for you - but an unclear choice is no choice.

These factors can lead to consumers being on a more expensive contract than is right for them. We see the effects of these problems in our results, as almost every one who uses our bill assessment could be on a significantly better tariff. In fact, we’ve been busy number-crunching to find out exactly how much people should be saving - the results will be in our interim mobile price index report, some of which makes for some eye-watering reading.

Billing and cost clarity:
Both the OFCOM consultation and a recent report by Consumer Focus talk of the hidden costs in billing. Often operators charge for itemised paper bills, even though without itemised billing it is impossible to see where your money is being spent. Different networks bill the same types of calls in inconsistent ways such as (depending on the network) rounding up calls, deferring charges and excluding voicemail from your inclusive allowances. BillMonitor takes these kind of things into account when working out the best tariff - but we often have to phone up the networks to find out exactly how much a certain type of call will cost. Compounding this is the fact the each network presents their bill differently and with varying levels of detail.

Ease of switching:
The current economic situation is making many mobile users think about switching. A recent survey by Booz & Company found that 43% are considering changing to a cheaper contract. Switching mobile network while keeping your number should be easy - you just get a PAC code from your old network and give it to your new one. It’s never quite that simple though; one of the BillMonitor team recently spent 45 minutes being bounced around a call centre, finally being put on silent hold for 10 minutes before he finally managed to get a PAC! Even though most BillMonitor users still save when they switch to a better tariff with their current network, consumers should be allowed to move to a good deal on a different network without this hassle.

Problems like these are exactly the reason why we created BillMonitor and we’re looking forward to see what OFCOM has to say.

In an absolutely massive move, Vodafone have announced that they’re planning to cut roaming prices down to local rates right across Europe. You can read the full press release at Mobile Industry Review or check out the official Vodafone site, although at the time of writing there’s nothing more than a placeholder there.

In summary, Vodafone Passport customers (And that’s anyone on Vodafone, as long as you opt in to it for free) will be able to use their phone to call and text the UK for the same prices as at home in 35 countries across Europe. As long as you’re calling back home, the free minutes and texts from your plan will apply. This all kicks in on the 1st June and runs through to the end of August.

On top of that, international calls will fall to as little as 5p per minute for pay as you go users from 15th May.

This is sure to leave most networks in the dust for big international users. Will any other networks step forward and attempt to compete?

It’s easy to forget just how expensive out of allowance calls are, but when you do the maths, it becomes clear. At best, you’ll pay 10p per minute for a mobile call out of allowance. How much do your in allowance minutes cost? Well, take, for example, Three’s 300 mix and match tariff. You get 300 minutes (assuming you just use calls) for £15. That’s 5p per minute of calling - half the price of a call made outside allowance. Therefore, if you make 450 minutes of calls, you’ll get a bill for £30! If you’d have gone for the £18 500 minute tariff, you’d still have 50 minutes to spare before you had to start paying for calls.

No matter which network you choose, it’s always worth thinking about choosing a larger tariff if you’re likely to go over the limit regularly.