Recently, we needed to make some changes to our mobile phone plan. As it’s a business plan, we called our account rep who alerted us to a neat trick.
If we transferred services from a competing carrier, we could get our first three months on the new deal for free. In order to do that, the account rep suggested that we buy some cheap SIM cards from another carrier, transfer our services to that carrier on the cheapest possible pre-paid option and then transfer them back to the original carrier the next day, thus garnering the three month discount.
Do you have any other neat tricks for scoring discounts? Share them in the comments.
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6 responses to “How To Score A Discount On Your Business Mobile Phone Bill”
With the accompanying downtime of service that would entail the savings would have to be significant!
Swapping carriers doesn’t happen instantaneously in my experience.
No, but it happens in a matter of <24hrs. And while that change is happening, the downtime is <1hr.
Source: I worked for a telco.
Sometimes it does happen very smoothly with the only downtime being a few short minutes and a physical sim swap once you’ve been notified its been done. Other times I’ve seen people offline for days when number porting disappears into a blackhole!
My wife ported her number between Telcos about a year ago, and it was an utter nightmare. People on certain Telcos were unable to call/txt her for months, something went wrong with the port, and every Telco blamed the other one, none would take responsibility for the problem. The amount of time wasted dealing with the issue on our part means I will NEVER consider porting a mobile phone number again – if I want to change Telcos in future, I will just change phone number. Ended up needing to get the TIO involved to get any action, and even then it still took weeks to resolve.
im with you on this one…its been a week, and i have been having dramas porting my number. its a joke.
I’ve done a few swaps between carriers in the last two years (telstra -> vodafone -> optus) for about 80 numbers. In each case we’ve got about 6 months free and a substantial new hardware credit.
The downsides you have to look out for:
-Some people get lost in the transfer. I’d say we had 5-20% failure rate (the number goes to the wrong sim card, the number just doesn’t get transferred, it gets the wrong kind of data/voice plan, etc). fixing up the various discrepancies can take a while.
-Phone locking. make sure it’s all unlocked ahead of time or you just wont be able to call anyone while you’re on the second carrier, even if it’s only for a day.
-You’ll have to pay out your original contract. If you have more than 3 months left in the contract, you’ll lose money with this.
-Any individualisation will be lost. you’ll have to re-record your voicemail, lose all saved messages, and set up any specific options for your number (roaming, visual voicemail, whatever)
Overall It’s still worth it for three months free service, but it does take some effort and quite a bit of annoying fiddly work.
You probably could have scored 6 months! Next time try me! 😉