“‘We can confirm reports of an FCC investigation into mystery fees that appeared on Verizon Wireless bills costing over 15 million Americans tens of millions of dollars,’ Michele Ellison, FCC enforcement bureau chief, said in a statement.”

The charges amount to from $2.00 – $6.00 and according to CNBC :

“The affected customers did not have data usage plans, which allow access to the Internet, and were charged because of exchanges initiated by software built into their phones, Verizon said.”

Errors can occur inadvertently or overtly, it is ultimately the end-user’s responsibility to monitor and demand that your carrier charge you only for what you’ve signed up for and pay for what you can expect to pay.

Most commonly I hear comments from clients about small charges like that not being significant to their bottom line.  Let me put it in a different way for you.

If you manage a dozen phones and were consistently overcharged just $4.00 per month, over a 3-year period that is $1,728 of waste.  Manage 200 phones?  That same time period is $28,800 wasted, when you look at 1,500 phones, we’re talking $216,000 WASTED.  We’ve seen waste in excess of 20% – 80% PER MONTH on telecom bills most people think were only slightly out of line.

Don’t let your company get taken advantage of, a telecom audit can reveal more than you could ever expect to find.

According to the article, CEO Vladimir Katalov:

All data transmitted between a BlackBerry Enterprise Server and BlackBerry smartphones is encrypted with a highly secure AES or Triple DES algorithm. Unique private encryption keys are generated in a secure, two-way authenticated environment and are assigned to each BlackBerry smartphone user. Even more, to secure information stored on BlackBerry smartphones, password authentication can be made mandatory through the policies of a BlackBerry Enterprise Server (default, password authentication is limited to ten attempts, after which the smartphone’s wiped clean with all its contents erased). Local encryption of all data, including messages, address book and calendar entries, memos and tasks, is also provided, and can be enforced via the IT policy as well. With the supplied Password Keeper, Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) encryption allows password entries to be stored securely on the smartphone, enabling users to keep their online banking passwords, PIN codes, and financial information handy — and secure. If that’s not enough, system administrators can create and send wireless commands to remotely change BlackBerry device passwords, lock or delete information from lost or stolen BlackBerries.

Sounds pretty secure, does it? As always, there is the weakest link. With BlackBerry, the weakest link is its offline backup mechanism.”

The article goes on to say that while this is disturbing, it effects backups alone, and well, frankly they’re “just backups”.  But Katalov also goes on to say that backups are are evil because they create a new instance of information that might be private or sensitive. Then he explains the hole in the BlackBerry backup scheme:

Backup encryption uses AES with a 256-bit key. So far, so good. An AES key is derived from the user-supplied password, and this is where the problem arises.

In short, standard key-derivation function, PBKDF2, is used in a very strange way, to say the least. Where Apple has used 2,000 iterations in iOS 3.x, and 10,000 iterations in iOS 4.x, BlackBerry uses only one. Another significant shortcoming is that it’s BlackBerry Desktop Software that encrypts data, not the BlackBerry device itself. This means that the data is passed from the device to the computer in a plain, unencrypted form. Apple devices act differently; the data is encrypted on the device and never leaves it in an unencrypted form. The Apple desktop software (iTunes) acts only as a storage and never encrypts/decrypts backup data. This is quite surprising since the BlackBerry platform is known for its unprecedented security, and we’ve been expecting BlackBerry backup protection to be at least as secure as Apple’s, which turned not to be the case.

What does that mean for us? We can run password recovery attacks on BlackBerry backups really fast — even without GPU acceleration, we can go over millions of passwords per second.

So, what does all this mean to you?  Simply put, there is a great deal of potential for any company interested in finding the data you back up to be able to get it.  This exploit means that now that it has been proven there is a method to crack this information, a rogue employee, competitor or even just some random hacker looking for a thrill can potentially get your data.

What would that data loss mean to your company?

Think this might be too much of a stretch for you to worry about?  Espionage and data loss occurs only with Fortune 500, government entities or James Bond – right?  I can show you how for about $500 or less, I can hire a motivated programmer to target your server and steal your data.  Really.

This exploit will undoubtedly be fixed, but until its patched, there are plenty of opportunities for your data to be compromised.  Talk to your experts and see what you can do to prevent this from happening today.

Hence the $8,000 cell phone bill last month grows to $8,900 – eh, it’s probably a okay.  Then inevitably the bill creep continues until after a few months, the bill inexplicably have reached $9,600.  Why?

As industry watchdogs, we see carriers introduce pricing changes that occur from time-to-time.  Some end users find the moves helpful, others find it confusing.

Take for instance today, the Wall Street Journal reports that Verizon is going to be introducing new data plans over the coming months moving away from the “unlimited” data plan of $29.99 per month.  This moves seems to mimic AT&T recent change in their data plans.  What exactly those new plans will look like will undoubtedly be based on usage level and seems to be an answer to stem the money-losing proposition of “giving away” bandwidth for free.

This gives the end-user one more reason to watch over their bills more carefully and yet another way to add to the confusion of how to monitor and mitigate telecom bill creep

As consumers we have little recourse other than to be overly cautious in watching those bills.  Make sure you take time to take notice of rate changes and when signing on the dotted line how that might effect you in the future, one things for certain – your bills aren’t going to be any easier to read, this I can promise.

Today, our cell phones are an extension of you.  Personalized.  The type of phone your use, tells a little bit about who you are and what you’re about.  Smartphones, applications, crazy add-ons.  Take a look at this video, we’re not a review site but for $894 you can turn your iPhone into a “professional” video camera.

Is this a waste of money, a cinematographer’s necessity, or showing off who you are as a cell phone owner?

In reality, the conversation about whether the above device is ridiculous or essential depends on the participants of the conversation.  A professional or hobbiest obviously who takes their profession seriously might be a practical use for this, but if you just want to take a video of the kids to send to the Grandparents, this might be overkill.  Rather, it is relevant to discuss this because what it underscores to me is the the true passion we have about our mobile devices.  It is really about communication and the rising tide of what we will see coming from not just telecom companies, but participating companies that make applications, latch-on devices, case protectors, musicians have all of a sudden become part of the telecom infrastructure.

In the business world when it comes to communication devices, IT considers itself a black and white participant.  We manage a simple device, give each person a dollar amount to reimburse for their mobile phone/device and that’s it – but it’s becoming so much more.  When the victims of Haiti needed help, you simply texted a message to a charity and you suddenly donated $10  to help in that relief.  Companies such as Apple are attempting to capitalize on the convenience and trust they give to the phone companies are trying to popularize paying for things using your mobile phone .  How are companies going to handle the newest method to drain money from the phone user?  In that moment, your simple IT shop now has the added problem of managing expenses for every mobile device owner in a corporate-liable environment.

In my experience, most people are addressing these new issues in a wait and see approach, but we think that sets a dangerous course that could surprisingly end up costing you tens of, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars more a month than you were expecting.

How much oversite do you give telecom review? Most companies believe that they have a good handle on their spend.  In truth, the vast majority participate in what I call the “last month review”.  They take a look at their bills, if it is within an acceptable percentage of last month’s spend, they approve it and move on.

I can’t tell you how through the course of a year, that could mean hundreds of thousands of dollars wasted, in simple terms that new project you’d like to get approved or the job you’re trying to save could have been justified with closer inspection of your mobile costs.

Our phones are extremely important to us.  They remind us of meetings, hold treasured pictures of our children and grandchildren, they capture brilliant ideas for work and pleasure, give you the latest sports scores oh, and they help us do the cool thing of talking to anybody in the world virtually any place we happen to be.

Watch out, your phone isn’t just a phone.  It’s part of you and your employees.  Don’t think so?  Try leaving your phone at home next week – see how long it makes you feel.

What is actually real and what is a nonsense charge that the phone company tacks on there to drive up your bills? You review and try and understand but most of the time, you throw your hands in the air and just pay the bill – right?

Every telecom provider works just a bit differently than the every other carrier, but believe it or not, every carrier is required to help consumers.

So, what is required of your telecommunications service provider? Let’s talk about long distance services….

ALL long distance carriers are mandated by the FCC to provide the consumer with information regarding your long distance telephone service. They must provide you with information regarding the rates, terms, and conditions of your service. If your carriers operates a web site, the FCC does require those carriers to provide that information on their website. Essentially, your long distance providers must show the consumers, what and how they charge for their services, rather than just telling the government what they’re doing. These companies “convey” this info to us through their web sites, our bills, and emails. Long distance companies often include information about changes in terms and rates, you’ve probably seen and thrown away those inserts with your bill – right?

Long distance providers are also required by the FCC to:

* Be clearly organized
* Identify the service provider associated with each charge;
* Highlight new service providers and indicate the date the provider change was made;
* Contain full and non-misleading descriptions of charges;
* Identify those charges for which failure to pay will not result in disconnection of the customer’s basic local service; and
* Provide a toll-free number for customers to call in order to lodge a complaint or obtain information. If the customer does not receive a paper telephone bill but instead accesses that bill only by e-mail or over the Internet, the telephone company may provide the customer with an e-mail address or Web site for inquiring about charges.
* Use standardized labels on bills when referring to certain line item charges relating to federal regulatory action

For example, let me give you the example of Minnesota. From the Minnesota Commerce website here are some of the required and non-standard charges you might see on a bill if you happen to live or have services in the land of 10,000 lakes:

Government Mandated Telephone Fees: The following fees are charged by all telephone companies and are not negotiable.

* Telephone Assistance Plan (TAP): $0.07 per line, per month (up from $.02 on August 1. 2008)
This fee is charged on each telephone line you have (not including cellular phones). It is used to help provide telephone service to Minnesota’s low-income residents.
* Telecommunications Access Minnesota (TAM): $0.06 per line, per month (increased from $0.03 on July 1, 2007)
This fee is charged on each line you have, including cell phones. It is used to fund programs that provide telephone service to people who are deaf, hard of hearing, or speech impaired.
* 9-1-1: $0.75 per line, per month (increased from $0.65 on July 1, 2009)
This fee appears on all telephone bills to operate Minnesota’s 9-1-1 emergency response system.
* State or local sales tax
These fees are assessed by state and/or local governments.

NON-Government Mandated Fees
The following fees may appear on your local phone bill and at first glance appear to be government mandated taxes, but in fact are not. These fees are not deposited into the local, state or federal government treasury, but are retained by the carrier. Some companies do not charge all these fees.

* Subscriber Line Charge (SLC)
Also called a “Federal Access Charge,” or “Interstate Access Charge,” the stated purpose of this fee is to help cover the local phone company’s costs of operating the local telephone network. This charge may be up to several dollars per month.
* Local Number Portability (LNP)
LNP allows you to keep your telephone number if you switch local telephone companies. An LNP charge on your bill pays for the cost of providing this service. LNP charges are temporary. According to FCC Rules, each company can collect the charge for five years after implementing the service.
* In-state Access Recovery Fee Several long distance carriers in Minnesota have recently added this charge to their phone bills. The stated purpose of this fee is to recover the companies’ expense of providing long distance service in Minnesota. You can avoid paying this extra charge by selecting one of the many long distance carriers that does not charge this fee.
* Universal Service Fund (USF) Carriers must pay a percentage of their revenues into a national fund that helps provide telephone service to poor and rural customers and is helping to link the nation’s schools, libraries, and rural hospitals to telecommunications networks, including the internet. Many carriers add a line item to consumer bills to recover this payment, but it is not government mandated and should not be in the “taxes” section of your bill. You may also see this charge on a cellular or pager bill.

What fees in addition to the above are “waivable”?  What can you ask refunds for?  In most cases we see, companies choose to ignore fighting any “extra fees” because they may feel they’re non-negotiable or required.  In many cases did you know that you can be incorrectly charged a fee because somebody can mistype a request on your bill or worse, if you were to call in they could actually reclassify your services and tack on a whole string of extra charges?  Yes – you bet it happens.

Let us know if you’ve seen anything funny on your bills – we’ll take a look at them – no charge and let you see for yourself what you could be overpaying for.

According to Engadget “Without giving a hard figure, the company[SPRINT] says that it expects to launch WiMAX service in “many” markets this year, with several notables among the lot: Boston, Denver, Kansas City, Houston, Minneapolis, New York, San Francisco and Washington, DC are all called out by name. SF and the Big Apple in particular will be huge wins”

The deployment of Sprint’s WiMAX will offer technologies to rival the Long Term Evolution (LTE) projects that many carriers around the world including Verizon and AT&T are adopting to build a the last leg of the 4G networks for the demands of speed and capacity consumers are asking for.

The race is interesting to watch and could decide what technologies dominate the next iteration of data communications.  Billions are at stake, we’ll see how this shakes out for the next chapter of data communications.

BONUS MAKE YOURSELF LOOK SMARTER TIDBIT:  If you’ve heard all the rah-rah about 3G networks and heard about 4G, all that the “G” means is generation.  3rd generation, 4th generation, it has nothing to do with any scientific mumbo jumbo – but it sounds cool doesn’t it?

The reasons for such an ambitious plan includes the ability access new markets and create business growth in fields in all areas of the US that would require broadband access in order to thrive.  Applications such as distance learning, telemedicine to giving users broadband access for the first time, in fact the chairman sites 100 Mbps as NOT the ultimate goal but he would like to shoot past and provide even higher speeds to consumers, perhaps such as Google’s recently announced initiative of 1 Gpbs speed for up to 500,000 customers.

There are significant obstacles that exist for the plan which are primarily due to the technology available today.   According to electronista:

Current cable modem service often peaks at 25Mbps and is typically expensive at this rate; new DOCSIS 3.0 modems can reach 100Mbps but are only available in a few areas and are so far only served 50Mbps connections. Verizon is the best prepared with its fiber optic FiOS network but would need to complete more upgrades to reach the 100Mbps speed across most of its network.

Internet providers have also traditionally been resistant to any moves to supply broadband to many rural areas that would be needed to reach the 90 percent coverage target, going so far as to sponsor “astroturf” (fake grassroots) organizations and engaging in frequent lobbying to discourage mandates for service in these areas. The advent of 4G is expected to mitigate some of this as it substantially lowers the cost of covering a remote area, although LTE and similar standards may provide much less than 100Mbps in practice.

While the exact method for deployment isn’t necessarily very clear, the plan is potentially good news for the end user.  What companies participate and how this plan is executed will be something we all should watch.  Wireless technology such as WiMax may offer a solution to help make this plan a reality and allow broad deployment, but keep your eyes peeled and those broadband hungry applications ready.

This morning, the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC) has announced their intentions of creating a unified open platform that would allow develops of applications to create an application program one time and that app would be able to be deployed to work on any carrier, device and operating system – universally.

The number of companies backing the WAC are 24 and include some of the biggest names in the wireless business today.   Of the largest names participating include AT&T, China Mobile, Orange, Verizon, Sprint and device manufacturers LG, Samsung and Sony Ericsson.  Such an idea, if successful would be an incredible dream for mobile developers as it would allow them to create an application one time rather than have to redesign the same application for different platforms and networks.

While some view it as a huge announcement that could potentially change the face of the applications, there are a few who view it as a potential disaster.

We’ll leave the pundits to argue whether such an organization’s grand plans will actually work or fail, what is obvious to us is absolutely certain, mobile devices are NO LONGER simply communication services that can be regulated from a spreadsheet.  There is potential for your organization to at the very least incur added charges to your monthly bill to, at the worst case  incur a data breach or malware attack from a rogue app.

The role of the mobile device is quickly changing, it is your responsibility to find the right way to manage those devices such as a software application that knows everything from keeping a mobile device policy, average departmental spend and accounting for inventory control.  An automated program can alleviate those type of headaches.  Talk to your telecom management firm to learn more about your options and how you can get ahead of the ever-changing mobile landscape.

Hardware designers are also concerned about the OS they operate, Apple and Research In Motion (RIM – Blackberry) are closed platforms available only for their devices, Symbian and Android are open source platforms that are available for quite literally ANY manufacturer to integrate into not only cell phones, but platforms such as netbooks and even Barnes and Noble’s e-Book reader uses the Android platform.

Pop quiz:  Which Operating System DOMINATES today’s mobile phone market?  Is it RIM, Apple Symbian or Android? The answer at the end of the article.

Microsoft has been a laggard in the industry accounting for approximately 18% of all mobile devices in the US according to comScore and roughly 8.8% of devices worldwide according to Canalys.

So today, the CEO of Microsoft Steve Ballmer took the wraps off the promising Windows Phone 7 Series at the Mobile World Congress wireless trade show in Barcelona.  It promises to be an upgrade which Microsoft is hoping to reverse the company’s sagging share in mobile.  Scheduled to appear later this year for the holiday season, the new interface looks to be a vast improvement over the tired 6.5 OS.  The device seems to be designed for the entire consumer experience rather than just simply making sure the phone works, it looks to be taking it’s positive response from their Zune handheld music player design into the phone itself.

Whether this new upgrade plays out well, we will have to wait and see.  It looks as though Microsoft isn’t going to go down without a fight and it may give some reason to consider taking a look at the phones when they roll out.

Oh, and the answer to the mobile operating system that commands the lion’s share of the mobile market?  Symbian at over 50% of the market today.  One thing’s for sure, this undoubtedly will change .

The article goes on to state that “the per-victim cost for a data breach involving a lost or stolen laptop was $225 in 2009, 10% higher than the average total cost of a data breach and 5% higher than the cost of a breach caused by a malicious attack.