Did a Sith Lord or Stormtrooper Create that Telecom Invoice?

I’ve spent years auditing corporate telecom invoices — and possibly watching too many Star Wars movies. In that time, I’ve asked myself one question more than any other: Sith Lord or Stormtrooper?

Is there someone in a dark hood, cackling softly in a server room somewhere, deliberately engineering invoices so complex that no sane person could ever fully untangle them? Or is it just a Stormtrooper situation — constitutionally incapable of hitting a target, getting a rate plan change right, or sending out a bill that actually reflects what was agreed?

It doesn’t matter. Either way the invoice is wrong. Either way you’re overpaying. Either way the Death Star is pointed directly at your budget.

That’s this blog, well that and a variety of gratuitous movie and popular culture references that regular readers of the Harvard Business Review will find excruciating.

You probably think you have this covered

If your company has somewhere between 200 and 100,000 employees, you have attorneys and procurement professionals. You have an IT team. You have account reps at every major carrier who assure you regularly that everything is fine.

Here’s what you actually have.

Your attorneys and procurement team are good — and overworked. They negotiate the contract, they move on to the next fire, and by the time the invoice arrives they’re three deals down the road. Is anyone checking whether what’s billing matches what was agreed? Do they have the time?

Your IT team is invaluable — and buried. They're managing helpdesk requests, yes, but they're also knee-deep in the mission-critical projects that actually keep the business moving forward — ERP upgrades, cloud migrations, enterprise software implementations, cybersecurity initiatives. The list is long and the team is finite. Nobody on that list has "audit 18 months of wireless usage data across every corporate device" anywhere near the top. That's not criticism. That's just reality.

And your carrier account rep? They are pleasant, responsive, and most likely compensated based on your spend. Read that last part again.

Nobody — attorney, IT, account rep, or otherwise — knows what other companies are actually paying. Carriers make sure of that.

That gap between what you’re paying and what you should be paying is where vendors live. Whether through incompetence or evil, they are quite comfortable there.

This is the part where the right reader — and you know who you are — feels a small, uncomfortable flicker of recognition.

Good. That’s why this blog exists.

A taste of what’s ahead

We once received a cease and desist letter from one of the two largest wireless carriers in the country for sharing “confidential customer information.” The confidential information in question was a rate plan code — that we had provided to their own employee, who had requested it from us. To help that employee look up a rate plan the carrier itself had created.

We got improved pricing a week later, the Sith Lawyer proved his worth to his Dark Master, and life went on. More on that in Post 2.

What’s coming

This is the first in a multi-part series on mobile costs alone — because mobile is where the problems are most universal, the invoices are most complex, and the overcharges are most consistent. We’ll cover rate plan chaos, international charges, devices that shouldn’t be on your invoice, features nobody uses, and the particular joy of implementing a bunch of fixes only to discover the carrier got 20% of them wrong.

We’ll share real-world stories along the way. Names changed, industries anonymized — but the numbers are real. Because nothing illustrates the incompetence-or-evil problem quite like a specific dollar figure on a specific line item that nobody was supposed to notice.

After mobile, we’ll move on to voice, data, and everything else. There’s plenty of material.

Let’s get into it.

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.