FAQ’S

1. What is the difference between a Telecom Expense Management (TEM) and Real-Time Telecom Expense Management (R-TEM)?
Telecom Expense Management systems analyze past bills from the carriers to determine if there were billing mistakes and to search for ways to optimize the telecommunications costs. The issue with TEM systems is that if it is on the bill it means the expense has already occurred. A Real-Time TEM is able to analyze the Roaming, Voice, SMS and Data usage in real time and use predictive methods to help prevent the costs from ever occurring. For example, you can save 20% to 60% of the costs of plan overages or international roaming if you knew about these events before or as they happened.

2. How did Anomalous Networks get started?
The company began as a Telecom Expense Management Consulting Firm that audited customer’s bills to determine ways to reduce Telecommunications costs. After overwhelming feedback from customers that they wanted to prevent costs not just analyze them, the company began development of its Telicost platform to help businesses, consumers and carriers eliminate Bill Shock.

3. What is Anomalous Networks’ product offering?
The company has launched two offerings: Telicost is a on-demand or SaaS-based R-TEM system that gives enterprise, medium-sized and small businesses a way to prevent Bill Shock and track, adjust and manage their telecommunication costs in real-time. It offers opportunities to save 20-60% of overall telecom costs. Telicost-Lite is a free app-only version of the R-TEM product that gives consumers the solution to Bill Shock at their fingertips.

4. How does it work?
The Telicost app monitors all end-user Data, Voice and SMS usage on available interfaces (ex: Cellular, Wi-Fi) and reports back to the Telicost Server for analysis. The Server aggregates the data and compares it to the configured Telecom Plans and Anomaly Alert definitions. The IT department and the end-user is then notified of important events such as projected data overage charges, non optimal data plan use, device inactivity, abnormal off-hour usage, large data transfers, roaming, etc. Telicost is an app-only version of the solution, where the end-user configures their own plan parameters in the app so Telicost can alert them to potential plan overages.

5. What are the key benefits to Telicost-Lite?

  • No more Bill Shock
  • No more use of non-optimal carrier plans

6a. What are the benefits of Telicost to a Business?

COST PREVENTION – By alerting the user and/or the administrator in real-time to expensive events such as Roaming or Plan Overages you can prevent or minimize these costs. With real time monitoring, you capture “in month” events before they can become costly surprises.

COST OPTIMIZATION – How do you know what “plan” to buy your users if you don’t know how much they use? Intelicost lets you know exactly how much your users consume and even lets you run cost simulations and automatically choose the optimal plans for your users. This will ensure you don’t buy too much or too little.

JOB SECURITY BENEFITS (For the Telecom Manager) – Telecom budgets are probably the most difficult to manage because your contracts are not fixed, they are dependent on usage. However, the Telecom Manager is still responsible for managing costs with a fixed budget. Telecom Managers running Telicost can now proactively manage their Telecom budget and not wait until the carrier bill arrives to make critical decisions.

SECURITY BENEFITS – Telicost detects, reports and alerts IT of anomalous events such as off hour work habits, large data transfers, changes to personal usage habits, unsanctioned device/network usage, etc. so that they can immediately respond to possible Data Leakage events.

PERSONNEL MANAGEMENT BENEFITS -Telicost allows the company to track employee use of corporate assets along with their GPS location to determine the extent of their use and whether they are being used for work or personal use.

6b. What are the benefits of Telicost to a Carrier?

At first glance carriers might think that a system that helps users preven carrier plan overages might be bad for the carrier. In reality, Telicost has been field proven to provide an overalll benefit to the carrier. When a customer expects a $100 bill and then actually receives a $500 bill, they do not immediatly pay the bill. They will typically get on the phone to customer support and argue the case, negotiate a billing credit, churn, bad mouth the company to others, etc. All of this costs the carrier money. Many carries actually lose money on overage situations. Telicost has proven to help carriers:

  • Increase ARPU, customer satisfcation, customer retentian and competitive steals
  • Decrease billing credits, customer support costs and churn

7. How much does the product cost?
Telicost-Lite is FREE. Telicost is typically sold in a SaaS model monthly per user fee. Contact us for a detailed price quote that will match your needs.

8. Why do I need Telicost if I can get an unlimited data plan from my carrier?
A couple of important points on unlimited plans:

  • Truly unlimited plans are very rare on a global level, the US is one of the few markets that offer them (and they are even starting to be removed in the US).
  • Most “unlimited” plans actually are not unlimited and have a cap in the fine print. We have many customer horror stories of people who “thought” they were unlimited but got huge unexpected bills.
  • International roaming is never covered in the plan and is hugely expensive.
  • Most people spend too much for the unlimited plan and never know it; the Telicost can alert people if they can save money by moving to a smaller plan.
  • The average North American 3G Modem user only actually uses approximately 160MB per month. Therefore, the average user does not need a costly unlimited plan.
  • There are many other “monitoring” reasons an R-TEM gets deployed such as tracking device activity for HR reasons (I gave Frank a BlackBerry and he has used Zero data, is he actually working?) and data activity for security reasons (Why is Frank transferring 1 GB at Midnight on a Saturday?)

9. What carrier networks do you support?
All wired or wireless networks are supported. All elements of the solution are carrier and technology agnostic.

10. Will the service providers be unsupportive of Telicost since it can reduce their revenues?
Our service provider partners tell us that 20% of all their “data” revenues are overage charge related. Yet, they are only able to collect a small percentage of this revenue and do not do it profitably due to customer support costs, billing credits, legal costs and customers churn. As such, our service provider partners are very supportive on Telicost because it increases ARPU and customer satisfaction while it reduces support costs, billing credits and customer churn.

11. What is Anomaly Detection?

One of the primary reasons to use the Telicost is for cost reduction. However, many of our customers use our solution to help them detect data anomalies such as:

  • Off hour usage
  • Unusually large file transfers
  • Device inactivity
  • Unusual network interface usage (LAN, Wi-Fi, Cellular)
  • Work vs. personal usage
  • Projected telecom overage charges
  • Device roaming
  • Dramatic increases or decreases in activity
  • Usage of non-sanctioned / new devices

12. Why enterprise deployments of public network technologies are less secure than private networks?
Enterprises have traditionally had tools to monitor what their users do on the Enterprise network. Until Telicost, there have not been tools available to monitor employee usage on Public Networks. Consider the following example. A company has two employees who use their corporate laptop to connect to a Public Network while at a Coffee Shop at 2 AM and upload 200Mb of data. The first employee is the Sales Representative for the Asian Pacific territory doing his job by sending his customers product presentations. The second employee is a senior software developer uploading raw source code files to Google Docs. These are completely different data events that would go undetected by Enterprises not using the Telicost solution.

13. Does Telicost support all types of carrier’s plans?
Yes, it supports all commonly found plan types such as:

  • Fixed usage limits
  • Pooled plans
  • Tiered/Flex plan
  • Upload vs. Download based plans
  • Home vs. Roaming plans

14. What is the basic architecture of Telicost?
The Telicost application is placed on the mobile device and monitors all end user data usage on LAN, WLAN and WWAN interfaces and reports back to the Telicost SaaS Server for analysis. The Server aggregates the data and compares it to the configured Plans and Anomaly Alert definitions. The IT department is then notified of important events such as projected data overage charges, non optimal data plan use, device inactivity, abnormal off hour usage, large data transfers, etc. The end user can then be warned with a complete audit trail of the warning. The system is even capable of cutting off the wireless service if the administrator wants total cost certainty.

15. What type of reports does Telicost produce?
The out-of-the-box reports contained in the system include:

  • Usage vs. Plan
  • Usage vs. Time
  • Telecom expense projection summary
  • Office vs. Non-Office usage
  • Wi-Fi vs. LAN vs. Mobile Broadband traffic ratio
  • Plan expirations
  • Hardware upgrades
  • GPS location
  • Roaming usage
  • Pooled usage

Given that all of the data is contained in a standard database any custom report can be produced.

16. Is Telicost hosted or installed on the customer premises?
Both models are supported. It is the customer’s choice. 95% of our customers choose to access a hosted Telicost server in a SaaS model.

17. What OS are supported by the Telicost Apps?
The current 3.0 version of Telicost apps support:

  • Windows XP, Vista and Win7
  • Mac
  • Linux
  • BlackBerry 4.6 or later
  • Windows Mobile 5.0 or later
  • Certain devices running embedded operating systems such as Sixnet Modems are also capable of running the Telicost app
  • iPhone/iPad OS 4.2 or later
  • Android 2.0 or later

18. Can the system track what type of data is transferred?
At the moment the system tracks items such as:

  • Data size
  • Interface used
  • User
  • Time
  • Device used
  • GPS location

It does not detect what applications are used or which files are sent. The company has plans to monitor these items in the near future.

19. Does Telicost also monitor Voice and SMS traffic?
Yes, on virtually all device platforms the solution allows the customer to get centralized reports, in real time, of voice minutes and SMS usage used on supported* operating systems.

20. What is the ROI of the solution?
Given that:

  • The average North American Data Plan is budgeted to cost $60 per month
  • The average monthly overage charges are equal to 20% of the budgeted amount (or equal to an unbudgeted average of $12 per month)
  • Telicost will prevent overages for occurring
  • Telicost will increase security and operational efficiency in your organization

A Positive Return on Investment can be expected in Month 1.

21. Is the data in the Anomalous Networks platform taken from the Carrier Billing System?
No, all of the information is taken from the device not from the carrier billing system. That means that the Telicost data is completely independent and can be used to audit your carrier bills. According to the Gartner Group, telecommunications invoices, on average, have a 7 to 12 percent margin of error. For a large multinational corporation running $250 million in telecom expenses annually, that percentage translates into as much as $30 million in erroneous billing each year.

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