50 Shades of Red Ink

The Pain and Suffering of International Roaming and Calling

Let’s start with the question that everyone is quietly asking: What the heck is Rick going to say now, and is it appropriate for LinkedIn? Maybe Rick should be posting this on OnlyFans, perhaps if he were younger, thinner, and in better shape!

To be honest, I have neither read the book nor seen the movie…50 Shades of Whatever. That said, after all these years of working with telecom carriers, I know quite a lot about dysfunctional, controlling relationships. The kind where one party tries to dominate the other into submission while claiming to have their best interest at heart.

If this sounds intimately familiar to you, and you’re thinking about something other than your company’s relationship with their telecom carriers, then you may be reading the wrong article. If, however, you are overly familiar with a love-bombing telecom Account Manager who really just wants to handcuff you into above-market rates, then read on, my friend!

International Roaming: When Your Company is Handcuffed into Overpaying

Day and Travel Passes and monthly travel plans can dramatically reduce the cost of international data and voice. But they have to be managed in both directions.

For companies whose employees travel internationally for work, the problem is one of process. Before someone lands in the Spain and starts checking their email on a default roaming rate, a Day and Travel Pass or travel plan needs to be in place. And when the traveler gets home, that plan needs to come off. An international roaming plan billing on a phone that hasn’t left the country in four months is just a quiet monthly donation to your carrier. Some companies have a process for this. Many do not. The ones that do not are paying for it.

Then there are the companies that don’t think international roaming is their problem at all. Their employees don’t travel internationally for work. Nobody goes overseas. Clean.

Except for the employee who took their company phone to the Maldives and, because they are a conscientious professional who never fully disconnects, stayed reachable. They checked email. They took the occasional call. They did what modern employees do. Nobody set up a Day and Travel Pass before they left because nobody thought they needed one. They came back to roaming charges that would make your eyes water.

The employee did nothing wrong. The plan just wasn’t in place. And the assumption that “our people don’t travel internationally” turns out to mean “our people don’t travel internationally for work.”

One more thing worth knowing about Day and Travel Passes: carrier Account Managers will tell you, with complete confidence, that these passes can only be purchased at standard rates. There is absolutely no flexibility. It is what it is. The price is the price.

They are wrong.

You can get better Day Pass costs, but it is not advertised. It is not offered proactively. But it is available, if you know how to ask. Your Account Manager either doesn’t know this or would prefer you didn’t.

Incompetent or evil. You know the rest.

International Calling: Is There a Safe Word that Will Get Them to Stop Billing My Company $3 per Minute?

Calls initiated in the United States that terminate in a foreign country are a separate and frequently overlooked line item. No travel required. Your employee is sitting at their desk in Cincinnati and calling a number in Paris. The charges accrue quietly, often with no guardrails, no alerts, and no policy in place to manage them.

We know this firsthand. One of our own team members was using a company device to help a friend plan a wine tour in Bordeaux. Completely reasonable. Genuinely cool. The $3 per minute charges that accumulated over 21 minutes before we caught it were somewhat less cool. A quick fix, a $5 per month international calling plan which we later removed once the tour was booked, resolved it immediately.

We’re the experts, and we caught it late. Multiply that across 10, 30, or 100 phones in a given year, and you have a material line item that nobody is actively managing.

The good news is that there are multiple international calling plans available across carriers, some providing discounted per-minute rates, some offering bundles of minutes for a fixed monthly fee, and some included at no additional charge within higher-tier rate plans your company may already have. The right plan depends on the volume of calls your employees make internationally and the specific countries they are calling. Getting this right requires an audit of actual calling patterns, not a guess, and not whatever the Account Manager recommends unprompted.

Carrier Tax Errors on International Services: One Final (Probably Not) Financial Humiliation

Let’s say you are a hardcore IT or Finance professional who eats telecom account managers for lunch. You are what my 20-something-year-old daughters refer to as a “Bad Bitch” (Disclaimer: the daughters have previously informed me that I am too old and uncool to know how to use that term or possibly even know what it means). You negotiated not just custom travel plans, but custom Day and Travel Pass rates as well. You patted yourself on the back, high-fived yourself in the mirror, and had a well-deserved celebratory cocktail. I am not saying that I myself have done this. I am also not saying that I haven’t.

Here’s what happens next.

A clerk at the carrier enters your custom rates into a complicated, and possibly nefariously self-aware, billing system. And as happened with several of our customers, the system improperly applied incorrect tax amounts to those international services, resulting in overcharges that accumulated quietly on the invoice month after month.

At one customer alone, this resulted in $3,500 per month in erroneous tax charges.

Nobody flagged it. The carrier certainly didn’t volunteer it. It just billed. Because that’s what the system does.

What This Looks Like in Practice

A global firm with more than 40 offices worldwide and over 10,000 employees hired us. Their business model involves consultants and subject matter experts traveling to client sites on both a planned and emergency basis, calling from wherever they happen to be to colleagues and clients around the world.

Could they have created a process to identify upcoming international travel and calling needs? Certainly. Could they have implemented a policy requiring consulting managers and partners to notify IT before international engagements? Absolutely. Could that policy have been followed consistently? Possible. Could IT personnel, upon receiving that notification, have implemented the appropriate Day and Travel Passes and calling plans in a timely fashion while simultaneously dealing with some other burning emergency?

Unlikely.

So the task falls to us.

And that’s just one client. For this customer, across US wireless carriers alone, we have completed 30 distinct projects involving international roaming and calling that have saved them over $1 million to date.

The Takeaway

International charges are not exotic edge cases reserved for global enterprises. They show up on invoices for companies of every size, in every industry, for reasons ranging from legitimate business travel to a wine tour in Bordeaux. The question isn’t whether they exist on your invoice. The question is whether anyone is managing them.

Most of the time, that answer is no. And whether that’s because the carriers make it genuinely difficult, or because complexity that goes unmanaged is quietly profitable, well. Incompetent? Evil?

Should We Work Together?

Hi, I’m Rick Friedman, CEO of Anilix. This blog is my attempt to pull back the curtain on an industry that has made a science out of overcharging the companies that can least afford the distraction.

When I’m not writing, I run Anilix, a telecom cost reduction firm I co-founded in 1998. We work with companies large and small across every category of telecom spend: mobile, voice, data, and everything in between. We work on a contingency fee basis. That means no upfront cost, no retainer, and no invoice from us unless we save you money first.

If any of this sounds familiar, the invoices that never quite make sense, the rates you suspect aren’t optimal, the team that’s too busy keeping the lights on to audit invoices, let’s talk. A 30-minute call costs you nothing and usually tells us both everything we need to know.