No more 5K phone bills. September 8th, 2008

Ask anyone who knows me and they will tell you I like to talk. I hate typing, I hate having to individually write each word. it interupts my stream of thought. This fondness for talking however has its drawbacks. Mostly is people switching off or me talking too quickly for them to understand what I am saying. Thats fine, I can live with that. But there is one thing I can’t live with;

€5123.00 MOBILE BILLS

I am lucky with my job, I get to travel from time to time. Mostly to the US and France, where we host various bits of infrastructure. But this willingness to talk costs when you are abroad. Our mobile provider, like so many others, knows that when I am away on buiness I am gonna be pressed for time to get the job done. They know I am gonna have my phone, be in a secnario where I need to use the 3G connection to collect my mail or check something out quickly. Heaven forbid you use a mobile mail server like Intelisync or Exchange for Mobile….

Its because the MSP’s know that I am at their mercy, they can get away with charging crazy prices for roaming data and calls. It really sucks when you come back from doing a job well only to have it highlighted that your expenses are crazy because you used you phone too much. But this is what we’ve trained staff to do. If there is a problem tell someone, don’t run and hide it, shout it out, get in touch with the person to have it fixed, not ignore the issue and don’t call them because it’ll cost a bloddy fortune!

However, all this now appears at an end. Recently we discovered something called MAXRoam, from another Cork based company. Why we’d never picked up on this before I will never know. We have 70 consultants who all do their fair share of globe trotting. Can you imagine what our monthly mobile bills are like?

This is where MAXRoam fits nicely. First things first its great to support another Irish company, second, its every better when they have a product that saves your company a lot of money. Their idea is simple. You get a SIM card, you divert your calls and map all the numbers you can be contacted on to it, jump on a plane, land in destination and wait for someone to call. When that ringer goes off, pick up the phone and talk away for as long as you want knowing that you are paying a very fair and reasonable price for your call while aborad. I mean its so much cheaper that using your own service provider whomever they be. Lets put it into cold hard numbers. If I go to the states with my Vodafone sim, its gonna cost me €1.09 according to the text I just sent Vodafone (Text 50221 ROAM USA to check for yourself, its free). So a five min call is €5.45. Using my MAXRoam sim, its gonna cost me €1.90 for the same five min call. Thats only 0.38 per min. WOW! DOn’t tell me this does not make financial sense. If your a startup and you want to save thats a lot of cash.

Now for the big news, Pat Phelan has just announed MAXRoam V2, that now as well as passing great savings on voice calls, saves you on your data charges too. More twittering, more email more surfing all for less. WOW!

I’m glad to say we’ll be siging the entire company up shortly, its quick, painless and saves you a tonne of cash, and in these times every bit helps.