How to master your work mobile

1 How to cut your mobile bill in half and retain all your service

A great many Irish business people are still stuck paying €60 or €70 for their monthly plan, unaware that prices have halved in the last five years. Your operator will try to roll your plan over at the higher rate, offering discounts on phones.

But unless you’re getting a completely free iPhone 7 or Samsung S8, you should not be paying over €50 per month for your monthly plan.

If you are, you’re overpaying — all operators have plans with lots of data (over 10GB) and all calls and texts for under €40 per month.

To get the lower rate, simply rebuff your ‘account manager’s’ attempts to swiftly renew your plan. Tell him or her that you’re switching to a rival service that costs €30 per month and watch how quickly they cut the price of your plan. Don’t worry about disruption — they can’t mess with your phone number (which is effectively yours, not theirs).

2 Look out for expensive loopholes in your EU roaming allowances

As we all know, roaming is supposed to be free across the EU now. But most Irish mobile users still face roaming charges for data, the only thing that really counts for keeping in touch with your business when abroad.

While one operator (Vodafone) offers the same amount of data at home and across the EU, a rough rule of thumb for other operators is that you get around 2GB of roaming data for every €10 in your monthly bill. So if you have a €30 tariff, that’s around 6GB of roaming data (assuming you have at least 6GB of domestic mobile data).

One other thing to beware of is the actual service levels of roaming partners. While Irish operators insist that 4G speeds will be honoured abroad, there are many reports of sub-standard service for roaming Irish mobile users travelling in countries such as Germany, France, Spain and the UK.

This reporter has experienced the difficulties first-hand in Germany, with much slower speeds and service on both Three and Vodafone handsets. One bright spot is that most Irish operators have now indicated that they will not reintroduce roaming charges for Irish travellers to Britain when the UK leaves the EU.

3 Dump your Windows phone

Thousands of Irish business and public-sector phone users are stuck with Windows smartphones. This is largely the result of corporate deals struck to get the devices cheaper than iPhones or premium Android handsets.

Unfortunately, Microsoft and the phone industry have peeled back support for Windows phones, meaning there are very few new devices being made and virtually no Windows versions of major work apps you rely on. The sooner you bail out of the Windows Phone system, the better.

4 Ditch your rip-off low-data plan

Some operators have an outrageous scheme that keeps unknowing customers, who pay upwards of €50 per month, on ancient, miniscule data allowances, so that they can fall into pricing traps if they use their phone for online activity. Anything under 5GB of data per month could leave in trouble if you need to rely on your smartphone outside a wifi area.

This is especially so if you want to use a laptop when you’re out on the road and you can’t find a decent public wifi hotspot (see how to cut the cost of your dongle below).

For context, the average amount of data for a €35 monthly plan is at least 7GB to 10GB. Some plans offer up to 60GB for the same monthly tariff, usually with all calls and texts thrown in too.

5 Jettison your ‘dongle’, save a fortune

A few years ago, a dedicated ‘mobile dongle’ was a mainstream way of getting a bit of broadband to your laptop for a quick email hit. But there are still 348,820 Irish people with monthly subscriptions (anything from €15 to €50) to these services, typically held by mobile operators.

But in many cases, they’re entirely unnecessary. That’s because you can usually achieve the same effect by simply turning on your own phone’s ‘personal hotspot’. This turns your phone into a wifi hotspot for other devices. Whatever data speed your phone gets can be tapped into with your laptop. These days it is considerable — 4G mobile connections deliver well over 50Mbs in many city or town areas of Ireland.

This being the case, why are you continuing to spend hundreds of euro every year for your dongle service? Clearly, you need a reasonable amount of data (I’d recommend over 10GB) in your monthly plan to be totally safe doing this.