If your phone bill hasn’t come in already you should probably be prepared to pay more than usual to ring in the New Year. That’s because usage tends to increase in the run up to the holidays. But should your phone bill really by that big? Just saying “It doesn’t look right” isn’t a good enough analysis to save you money. Instead, follow these resolutions to get to know your cellular phone and landline bills.

To manage your telecom expenses you need to understand them. To understand them, you need to define and classify them. For many businesses, doing this internally entails a great deal of data entry and specialized spreadsheet use. That’s why our communications management software specializes in helping management perform these tasks through an intuitive web interface. The following categories are useful to help any business understand its telecom expenses.

Speech recognition and text to speech applications have had a bad rap in the past because the technology was rushed out the door, before it was really ready. If you’ve been disappointed in the past, fear not: New applications work pretty well. The main challenge now lies in choosing the apps and hardware that work best for you. This is just one example of the everyday issues that telecom expense management professionals like us deal with.

We here at GILL Technologies are excited at performing cellular expense management duties for the new pomegranate phone.* Click through the features (go through all of them!) to see why this phone goes above and beyond any previous high end mobile device on the market.

Every few years, software and hardware manufacturers team up to push thin client computing on consumers. Whenever this happens it reminds me of the 90s movie Singles, where one character, pushing his vision for luxury subways for Seattle, ignores the simple truth that keeps getting thrown in his face: “People like their cars.” People like their fat-client, autonomous PCs and devices, too. Now, thanks to the rise of high speed mobile data, Microsoft and others are sounding the call to thin clients again under the guise of “cloud computing.” Windows Azure is one of several such initiatives that promise flexibility and convenience . . . for a price.

As far as Canadian ISPs are concerned, the OECD’s bandwidth figures are . . . less than complementary. This CBC story on  broadband summarizes the issues. Canadians not only pay too much, but suffer from anti-competitive practices and an unwillingness to finish the job of bandwidth penetration. In short: the ISPs gouge consumers, but they’re too cheap to spend that money on providing better service. Trends like Bell’s “traffic shaping” policies make comparisons even worse. Canadians have to deal with one of the worst per megabit costs in the world - US$28.14, compared to Japan’s US$3.09.

I want one box. I want to use it for pictures, phone calls, email, the web and the odd bit of work: writing, spreadsheets - all that stuff. I want to do it anywhere I go, too.

Voice over IP technology is a mature technology that in many cases offers significant savings compared to conventional telephony. If you’re already paying for broadband, chances are switching to VoIP is a good idea. We routinely recommend it to clients.

Two or three years ago we braced for a yet another communications paradigm shift — one that was supposed to take effect now. The mobile WiMAX revolution would have been fascinating for use telecom expense management folks. Maybe it still will be, but despite the tremendous promises of the technology there’s been more fizzle than pop out of it.

Canadians are due for some unhappy developments. Bell and Telus will charge for incoming text messages starting in August (8th for Bell, 24th for Telus). Getting a text message will cost 15 cents a pop unless you have an unlimited texting plan.