Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
AT&T Claims 40% of iPhone Sales Made to Business Customers
- Thread starter MacRumors
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
Surprised everyday.
For the record, It's not available for my company, we've never seen this as an option for our iPhones.
Explain to me why anyone in their right mind would pay $40 or even $32 for a data plan that you can get for $30?
Attachments
![Corporate Self Care -[eBill-22]- Subscriber Summary-1.jpg](/data/attachments/193/193629-ea3d0524c67bf6b957abd46ab46e7973.jpg){kind=small}
On the flip side, my larger and rather cheap company doesn't have any deals with ATT and do not outright provide corporate phones. They will however reimburse you for a personal phone each month if you are someone who they think needs to be contactable 24/7. Nearly all the executives have switched to iPhones without being given a discount or being on any FAN business account. There are only a few people left with Blackberries by this point.
A growing trend is for companies to sidestep the whole cell phone ownership issue and 'allow' employees to use their own phones, perhaps with cash reimbursement of a portion of their cell contract charges paid directly to the employee.
Ostensibly to give employees a 'choice of the phone they want to use', but more likely a way to force cost onto the employee.
See my response above.Sorry. That is wrong.
Here is a grab from my latest Work phone bill:
It's not an available option on our corp. account, so I've never seen it.
We just by the $30 plans for them.
This is spot on. A few companies are starting to give them an option (mainly some tech and a few law companies) but I almost never see them as corporate issue yet. All the business people who do have them bought with their own hard earned. There is no way this number is even close to right. Cut it in half, cut in half again, then half again and another half and it's still not right.
Do you have FAN with them that gives you percentage discounts?
Ours gets 20% (so that $45 really becomes $36)
AT and T
I wonder why any business would go with the evil AT&T. I mean everybody bitches and moans about AT&T. I would hate to lose a contract or a sale because my carrier is substandard.
I wonder why any business would go with the evil AT&T. I mean everybody bitches and moans about AT&T. I would hate to lose a contract or a sale because my carrier is substandard.
Because they really are not that bad, and they provide the best option for people who need to travel overseas.
That's what I been saying all a long.
I use my iphone for work too, and it is my personal one (connected to exchange, gmail, and mobile me). I have 174 apps for my iphone and ipad - allows me to do 90% of what I need to do for work (except run virtual machines, PC Anywhere for our PC anywhere connection only clients, and cisco's easyconnect VPN is not supported).
Other than that, all my project management, working in the cloud, email, internet, documentation (word processor, spreadsheets, etc) - can all be done on my iphone and even better on my ipad.
If it was not for the Cisco easyconnect VPN issue, i probably could probably use it for Remote Desktop (which is 90 % of our clients).
And yes, for an experiment off hours one night; I used my ipad to remote into my work PC in my office (10 feet away) from the comforts of my couch. worked pretty well.
Indeed...
When I was, let's say 'unencumbered' by my last employer, one of the parting gifts was a permanent (I hope) 15% discount on my cell number, which I've found applies to the voice portion of my family plan.
So I guess they're counting me as a business user.
Yep... we get 27% off voice/messaging services and BB data services.
We don't use Exchange, which may play into how our contract was setup.
I have a personal iPhone connected to a Business Account for the Corporate discount. I assume they are measuring it that way which is not entirely accurate accounting I agree.
Well let's see.. In my experience, both work and personal.
1. Sprint has billing issues.
2. Sprint only puts towers in major cities and along interstate highways, so you get less coverage.
3. I was on Sprint / Nextell and while in New England, even in the larger cities I had spotty service, yet a friend on AT&T , a friend on Verizon, and a friend on tracphone were making better calls than me.
4. Verizon's service is spotty in my area and AT&T works better.
5. I never had an issue with AT&T
AT&T is really not that bad. Especially since they bought BellSouth and Cingular, now I get even more coverage.
My wife and I both have iPhones and we work for the same company. We have our company's corporate discount but we pay the bill for ourselves and don't use the phone at all for work purposes. I'm about 95% sure that we are counted as "Business Customers" because everytime I call for support I'm transferred to their "business solutions" department of their call center. I'm curious to know how many of these "business customers" that AT&T speaks of are actually worried about above average security.
That's a really nice anecdote, however it's only relevant to you.
When a mobile operator's coverage is assessed, it's based on the experiences of a statistically significant portion of the users, not just you. That's fine that it works great for you, but it does not work for many, many people. The latter part is statistically significant, the former is not.
The fact of the matter is that AT&T has some major coverage issues because very prominent areas suffer poor service, notably the San Francisco Bay Area (particularly the city of San Francisco) as well as Manhattan. There are a lot of people who live, work, and visit those areas. That makes problems in those areas more statistically important than great service in Salina, Kansas (I just used that city as an example, I have no idea if which mobile operator provides good service in that city).
You are lucky, not authoritatively right.
In the big picture your special situation doesn't matter since all major carriers should have a similar percentage of folks with unusual circumstances. Likewise, each carrier probably has a few customers on a personal plan who are getting reimbursed by their employer.
Some people on business plans are only using their phones for personal reasons while some people on personal plans are mostly using their phones for business. Since it is doubtful that any given carrier sees this behavior more than their competitors, it's not important. Basically these exceptions cancel each other out.
It's more the IT department who is worried about security, not the individual users on an enterprise plan.
That's a really nice anecdote, however it's only relevant to you.
Seriously, neither SF nor NYC are the center of the universe and the *vast* majority of business travelers never go to either of these cities. In fact, the iPhone appears to be - inexplicably - a wild success despite AT&T's poor coverage in these areas.
And if I had such terrible AT&T coverage where I lived, I wouldn't get an iPhone in the first place.
When I got my iPhone the AT&T rep said, hey, do you or anyone in your family go to school? Yep. My wife was a part time student at a local university... bam. FAN account discount.
I called support two weeks ago and was forwarded to the AT&T business unit for assistance because my account was a business account. I asked how that happened and they said it was because I had a FAN discount.
Do college students count as enterprise customers? Does the spouse of a part time student count? According to AT&T - yes.
I called support two weeks ago and was forwarded to the AT&T business unit for assistance because my account was a business account. I asked how that happened and they said it was because I had a FAN discount.
Do college students count as enterprise customers? Does the spouse of a part time student count? According to AT&T - yes.
That is pretty much it. They look at individual "consumer" accounts vs. accounts with business or enterprise plans. The issue is that there is so much overlap between these since they are mobile systems.
An employee with a company paid iPhone can take it home to talk with family and friends. Also, someone self-employed or who may work for small or medium sized business that doesn't do enterprise accounts could be making business calls with their phones.
It is not like the old Ma Bell days where you can count where the phone is wired and check the zoning to compare residential vs. business. There has to be a huge margin of error in this survey.
