I just had one of those hang on a minute moments about the moneysupermarket.com story (see below). The 130 average overspend the companys research identified may be valid for contract customers, but theres no way it can apply to non-contract customers.
I put a call in to moneysupermarket.com Head of Broadband and Mobiles, Rob Barnes, to raise the query, and he assured me that the research was based only on contract customers. So far so good. In order to arrive at the 8.45 billion figure, however, the firm has multiplied the 130 average overspend by the 65 million mobiles registered as active in the UK (according to the Mobile Data Association). This, Barnes conceded, was an error. According to the mobile phone question answering service, AQA 63336 (Any Question Answered), 70% of mobiles in the UK are pre-pay, which means that figure of 8.45 billion should actually be 30% of 8.45 billion, i.e. 2.5 billion.
Its still a shocking figure, but only 30% as shocking as moneysupermarket.com originally said it was.

David Murphy
Editor