Mobile Cashback Comparison

Three-quarters of mobile phone subscribers are wasting an average of nearly £200 a year because they are on the wrong contract, research suggests.

The national billmonitor mobile report based on the analysis of 28,417 anonymised mobile phone bills and their usage, compared against 8,530,118 mobile phone contracts available in the UK on March 2011:

• 76% of UK mobile subscribers waste £4.899 billion on the wrong mobile contracts
• Just 5% of UK post-pay customers are responsible half the total spend on average
• The data of customers of all the main networks, except 3.

People over-estimating how many minutes they would spend on the phone was the main reason for the overpayment, wasting nearly £5bn a year, with most using just a quarter of their monthly allowance.

As well as those customers opting for excessively large talk plans, the researchers found that many others were signing up to deals that were too small and then being hit with punitive charges for going over the limits.

Billmonitor was created and is run by a group of Oxford University mathematicians & Dr Stelios Koundouros, one of the company’s founders, believes the reason behind that choice was psychological – by selecting a lower plan, users were able to convince themselves that they could run their phone more cheaply, even if their final bill did not reflect that.

Taken together, Billmonitor calculated that these two groups – those who underestimated their usage and those who overestimated it – were wasting £4.9bn per year, which works out at £194.71 each for such customers.

Click if you want to download the whole report for yourself

The team has developed models for analysing complicated systems where a large number of variables need to be considered & has calculated that, in the UK, there are a total of 8,134,979 different contract permutations on offer to mobile phone customers.

Billmonitor’s comparison system, which is the only one to be approved by telecoms watchdog Ofcom, compares users’ real-life bills to the available deals. If you think you could be one one of the 76% of people on the wrong contract, analyse your mobile bills with billmonitor and find out!!