The Register® — Biting the hand that feeds IT

UK.biz hit for £250m in phone bill blunders

'SMEs get worse deal'

Free whitepaper – PowerEdge energy Smart brochure

Billing blunders and the misuse of company phones by employees are costing UK businesses an extra £250m a year, according to alternative telco Energis.

Its study found that three quarters of business phone bills are wrong and that seven in ten businesses are paying over the odds for their calls. Bolt on all those "personal" calls made by workers and Energis reckons companies are facing a real financial headache.

Said Peter Northing, corporate telephony expert at Energis: "The bigger the phone bill, the greater the risk of billing errors and misuse not being picked up. Fraudulent phone use alone can add up to 15 per cent to the bill but still pass unnoticed."

Although these figures are based on a survey of big firms one of those behind the research warned: "If this is the deal that corporates are getting, we can only assume that small and medium sized businesses (SMEs) are getting a worse deal." ®

Related stories

Small.biz faces higher broadband charges
Scottish small.biz gets £1m broadband hand-out
Broadband ISPs must wise up to small.biz needs

Free whitepaper – Optimizing the data center for cost and efficiency

Don’t Miss

DustbinDirty, dirty PCs: The X-rated picture guide

Ventblockers Horror beyond human imagination

SC09Top 500 supers - rise of the Linux quad-cores

SC09 Jaguar munches Roadrunner

Ubuntu teaser Early adopters bloodied by Ubuntu's Karmic Koala

Smooth Windows upgrade it ain't

Sign up, sign up for The Register IT security newsletter

Narrowcasting for the email classes