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Layered Views To Understanding Data Usage
Like anything else, the deeper you can probe into the data usage patterns of your employees, the more powerful the decision-making possibilities are. Every company is experiencing steady growth in data costs on wireless invoices. Your ability to manage and control that data usage is fundamental to effective cost management and control. Drilling deeper into the usage patterns requires progressively powerful tools. Here are the three levels of data insight available today.
Total Monthly Data Usage
Every carrier invoice reports the total amount used by the device because most billing plans are charged on data used or more correctly stated, data purchased based on a prediction of the upcoming month’s usage. This data usage provided in every carrier invoice is sadly underused by companies. With the right tools for extracting and reporting this data companies can carefully size their pools to ensure a minimum carrier investment month to month. Just as important is to understand top user behavior and monitoring employee usage, device by device. If you haven’t looked deeply, you will be surprised at how easy it is for some employees to consume, 20GBs, 50GBs, or over 100GBs in a month while your overall company average may remain around 2GBs/device monthly.
Daily Data Usage Patterns
Increasingly, carriers are providing individual data transaction information containing a time-stamp and a quantity used. For AT&T and US Cellular, this data is part of the standard raw-data invoice format. In Verizon’s case, the data may be exported from their portal to augment the billing information. So what value is there beyond just understanding monthly total usage? Actually this is where the interesting insights occur. While the carrier doesn’t sell data based on peak or off-peak usage as was the case with voice, it is quite illuminating to daily patterns of use when broken out by peak and off-peak data usage. Below is a standard view provided by MobilSentry, available for any device for which the carrier provides data transaction records. In a recent study of over 200M data transactions for business liable devices, we learned that 52% of data usage occurred after hours between 7:00 PM and 6:00 AM or on weekends. Wonder why your employees need 2GBs of data on a Sunday afternoon? Could it be streaming a video?
The Ultimate View – Actual Sites Visited
The third and most revealing look at data is represented by views of the actual sites visited by a device. Not just how much and when but the actual type of data usage. Don’t expect to ask your carrier for this information, it is not available. You will have to ask MobilSense. We possess the ability to capture data on the carrier network, including the destination site. That data can be made available showing usage amounts and percentages by category as shown below.
