Network World — SAN FRANCISCO -- Wireless plans are a great place to start for companies looking to cut communications costs, with one firm reporting at VoiceCon that it saved $33,000 per month by renegotiating unfavorable contracts.

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The communications manager from an Ottawa construction firm told a peer discussion group on cost containment and control that the savings came as a result of pointing out how unfair its contracts were based on other more appropriate plans the wireless carriers offered.

The VoiceCon session was set up for attendees to share how they were cutting costs and to ask for advice from others in the same boat. Participants didn't identify themselves to promote candor.

"We were getting royally screwed," the Ottawa manager says. One provider involved was so contrite it gave the firm a one-year service credit, she said. The company never had to threaten to walk away from the contracts. "We didn't push that hard. We would have quit but it was unspoken. They realized we were a good customer that paid our bills."

How companies are cutting costs

The firm saved so much money it hired a full-timer to sift through the wireless bills every month looking for errors in its favor, she says.

Another participant says the County of San Bernardino, California, hired a former Verizon billing agent to comb through its Verizon wireline bills. She found $300,000 worth of overcharging. "She's paid her salary for the next five years," a workshop participant from the county said.

The county is following up by hiring a telecom billing consultant to audit its bills for the next two years in hopes of correcting even more overcharges. The auditor is working for a percentage of the errors it finds, so the contract costs the county nothing.

An IRS policy from the days when having a cell phone was a big deal is driving some businesses to push cell phone ownership onto their employees. It saves the companies money but it also reduces the administrative headache of examining phone use every month, telecom managers say.

One Texas energy firm used to issue cell phones to about a third of its 300 employees, but no more. The IRS pointed out it had to consider personal use of the phones by employees as income and had to pay payroll taxes on it, a participant from the company said. Figuring out that each month was such an administrative headache that it changed its policy, she said.

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