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  Tips to Control your Mobile Spending

  Jayesh Limaye, Sep 06, 2010 1306 hrs IST

  A little caution and smartness is all that's required to bring down your monthly bill significantly

  

Are you one of those who feel dizzy each time you look at your monthly mobile bill? Well, join the club. No matter how hard many of us try to curb our bills, we invariably end up in the same situation month after month wondering where we went wrong. It seems like the mobile phone has become an efficient tool of siphoning our hard-earned money. The bills have so much of technical jargon and fine print that it only serves to add to the confusion.

We at Techtree have put together some very useful tips that can help you tide over this problem. A close study of the bill is your first step out of this misery.

• Billing Plans: Choose your billing plan according to your usage pattern. Most mobile service providers have a one month starter-pack that lets you analyze your usage; the mobile service provider can even recommend plans that suit you. You can then choose whether you should go for Prepaid or Postpaid plan.
  
  A common misconception is that SMS is always cheaper than making a call, but this is not always true. With certain talk plans, making calls is actually cheaper. Most mobile service providers have mobile-to-mobile plans of 50 paise or less per minute at a nominal monthly rent. This makes it cheaper to make short calls rather than exchanging 4-5 SMSes of Re 1 each (in case of SMS conversation). Also, it is more effective to talk within a minute than to send a single SMS.

• Analyse your usage pattern: Scrutinize your bill and try to find if you make more number of calls to people who use mobiles or those who are subscribers to a particular service provider. If this is the case, it makes sense to switch to that mobile service provider as most mobile service providers have subscription plans that provide discount on same service provider calls.

• SMS Addiction: If you are one of those who firmly believe that mobile phones were invented just to send SMSes, you can take advantage of special SMS packages, some of which let you send SMSes at just 10 paise per SMS.

• Roaming: If you are a frequent traveller (or even if you aren't) it is better to activate national roaming, as this has recently been made rent-free by many mobile service providers. However, please check with your mobile service provider first. In other cases, some mobile service providers who charge rent for roaming, enable roaming by default when you purchase a subscription for the first time. If so, you may need to request to disable it.
  
  Avoid calling landlines while roaming, as such calls are more expensive than calling mobile phones. Calls are generally cheaper than SMS in this case too; SMS costs Rs 2 while calls can cost anywhere between Re 1 and 3 depending on the plan. A roaming plan also lets you call anywhere in India at Re 1 per call and therefore it is an attractive option.
  
  Make sure that you stick to the same service provider even while roaming. For example, if you are a Vodafone subscriber in your hometown, manually select Vodafone network in your mobile phone's network settings even when you are in another city. In case that network is unavailable, select an alliance network which you can find on your mobile service provider's website. If you use any other network, you may end up paying heavy interconnect charges.
  
  
• Value Added Services: Beware of Value Added Services such as Horoscope, Dating, Cricket updates, Contests, etc., which usually cost you Rs 6 per minute. Similarly, steer clear of ringtones, wallpapers and games downloads, which can easily cost you anywhere between Rs 4 and Rs 50.

• Mobile Internet: Mobile Internet is indispensable to many on the move. However, it can also drain your wallet in a big way if used unwisely. If you do not need to download stuff, WAP is the way to go, as most mobile service providers offer it at a price lower than GPRS. Some mobile service providers charge for data transfer at a usual rate of 10 paise per 10 KB. While this may seem to be an insignificant amount, you should know that an average web WAP page amounts to 15 KB, while normal web pages are larger even in Opera Mini. You would invariably lose track of the number of pages you have surfed and the amount of data transferred during an Internet session.
  
  If you stream data, like watching YouTube videos, you may easily end up with a huge bill at the end of the month. You can reduce the amount of data transfer by disabling images and sounds from the Internet settings of your mobile phone. Better still, you can go for certain mobile service providers who do not charge for downloads at all, though the Internet speeds are invariably slower in such cases. If you are a heavy user and need GPRS, it is better to go for a flat rate unlimited subscription.
  

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