This article on ArcticStartup.com is about a new company, Alekstra that is planning on becoming a world wide phone company. Not by selling handsets and setting up cell towers, but by taking over the billing.
Yes, you got that right. They have discovered that with any large phone bill, there are a lot of errors. By analyzing the bills, they are going to offer to monitor the account and charge a percentage of the difference. Thus they will be come the biller and not the phone company.
The company was started by a former Director at Nokia, Toni Toikka. It sound like a great idea to me. I can’t see it getting down to individual accounts any time soon, but for businesses, especially multi-nationals it makes a lot of sense. I did a brief trial at doing something similar in the US on electric bill and saw info about doing it with phone bill in the mid 1990′s. At that time it was thought that the average $500 electric bill would normally have at least $500 in errors during the year. Either from actual meter reading errors or from the lack of switching plans when changes were made to existing plans.
Phone bill are much more complicated than electric bills, especially for multi-nationals.
Read the full article here and tell me if the phone companies now have something else to keep the executives awake at night.