Member Article

Ofcom ‘ignores’ the UK SME ‘Wild West’ mobile provider market, according to Billmonitor report

Billmonitor, the UK bill analysis and mobile price comparison service, has revealed UK SMEs overpay by £1bn on their mobile bills after releasing the findings of its investigation into B2B mobile providers. 

As an intermediary between SMEs and the mobile providers they procure, Billmonitor claims to have a ‘unique’ viewpoint on what they should be spending. The company’s model indicated that one mobile operator was surprisingly more expensive than the competition, and suggested the cost difference between the cheapest and most expensive provider was 16.3 per cent for an average SME.

Implored to independently verify this cost finding, Billmonitor sent a number of Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to Ofcom, asking whether Ofcom’s data confirmed differences in average bills between mobile providers. The regulator resisted sharing evidence over consecutive FOI requests until, on the third request (February 2018), it revealed a “15-20” per cent cost difference between the cheapest and most expensive mobile provider for business services, confirming Billmonitor’s original findings (upon the eve of our report launch, Ofcom is now attempting to retract, calling its own data “no longer reliable”).  

However, Ofcom still refused to confirm the identity of the most expensive mobile provider, and suggested the significant cost differences between mobile providers might be attributable to varying average usage across the different providers. Billmonitor was unconvinced - why would high usage SMEs flock to one particular provider when no such provider offers better deals for higher users?

Billmonitor built its own statistical model, analysing bills from 356 businesses, comprising thousands of mobile connections. Importantly, this model accounted for differences in usage by SME customers of the different mobile providers, and strongly suggests Ofcom’s assertion was unfounded.

With 89.9 per cent confidence – based on the statistical analysis accounting for differences in usage – Billmonitor can reveal that EE is the most expensive major mobile provider in the UK for business contracts. Billmonitor can also - with 75 per cent confidence - reveal that O2 is likely to be more expensive than Vodafone.  

“It is staggering that in a market so critical for businesses, there isn’t oversight to prevent SMEs falling victim to what is becoming its own ‘Wild West’,” said Dr Stelios Koundouros, Billmonitor’s founder and director. “We call on the CMA to investigate the business telecoms market, to take over the job Ofcom seems to show little interest in despite Billmonitor’s three year-long pleas, and ensure SMEs of all sizes get a fair deal when procuring a mobile provider “

“The fact that one provider can charge firms with similar average usage significantly more than another is a symptom of a broken market. As we move into the post-Brexit era, empowering the UK’s SMEs with fairness and transparency - as the CMA successfully did for the energy market, whose uncompetitiveness was only half as costly for SMEs - should be a key point on the government’s agenda,” Koundouros added.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Author .