In July our mobile bill passed nineteen thousand pounds for the month, about a fifth higher than a year earlier, in a year when we had not added a single driver or depot. The carrier's account manager, who was pleased about it, sent me the breakdown.
We hold two thousand six hundred and forty SIM cards. They sit in drivers' handsets, in the telematics units in our vans, in the backup routers at every depot, in managers' phones and in a few card terminals and gate intercoms. When we checked usage, six hundred and twelve of them had not connected to a network in ninety days. Each was still costing between six and fourteen pounds a month, about seventy one thousand pounds a year for nothing. Eleven more were connecting regularly from devices we could not find. One had run up three thousand eight hundred pounds of data roaming in Romania, from a handset that fleet had written off as stolen in February.
The SIM and the device it lived in had separate lives in our records. Devices were in the asset register, with a serial number, a site and an owner. SIMs were in the carrier's billing portal, with a number and a tariff. Nothing connected the two. When a handset was retired, broken or lost, somebody closed the asset record, and the SIM went on billing, usually in a drawer, sometimes in a skip, occasionally in somebody else's pocket. No process had ever asked anybody to cancel one.
Every SIM is now recorded against the device it sits in, by both serial numbers, and a device cannot be retired in the register while an active SIM is attached to it. Writing off a lost or stolen device suspends its SIM in the same step, through the carrier's interface rather than by a separate email. A SIM with no traffic for sixty days is suspended automatically and cancelled at ninety unless somebody claims it. Roaming is off by default and switched on per person for a trip. And the data allowances are now pooled, so an idle card costs us its line rental rather than a full allowance.
Four hundred and eighty SIMs were cancelled in the first month, and the monthly bill is back under fifteen thousand pounds.
We had been counting devices carefully for years. What the carrier was charging us for was a small card that outlived them.
– Serguey Shinder
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