When we calculate your personalised deal results, we have to make a few assumptions about the data you give us – either when you enter the details yourself, or when we analyse your bills. So here are the assumptions we have made:
Data Provided By You
When you enter your phone usage yourself, we aren’t able to compare the results with your current actual usage, so please check carefully because it may be that the provider you are with now can give you the best deal based on what you need. Compare the deals we provide with what you already receive before making any decisions!
To keep things simple, there are a few things which you can’t give us specific details on, and so aren’t included in our recommended results. This includes Blackberry email, non-geographical calls (e.g. 0800 numbers) and voicemail charges. So it’s important that you take this into account when analysing our results. Voicemail calls should be included in the number of mobile minutes you use, and for non-geographical calls you will have to simply add the cost of these to the deals we find for you.
General Assumptions
Contract Types Covered – Currently mobilife is focusing on the handset included pay monthly market and so we are not able to recommend SIM only or Pay As You Go tariffs. We are working hard to start covering these and will update the system as soon as we can!
Deals Covered – mobilife covers all publically available handset included mobile phone deals from the 5 main networks – O2, Orange, T-Mobile, Three and Vodafone – as well as others from the three “virtual” network operators: Virgin Mobile, Tesco Mobile and Talk Mobile.
Extras & Bundles Covered – Mobilife covers more than 95% of the bundles and extras offered by the networks listed above. During your bill analysis, it is impractical to identify the network which every one of your phone calls is made to. This means that although we try our best, we can’t always include things like friend and family bundles in our recommendations. However, we do look at all the usual stuff like bolt-ons for additional minutes, text messages, internet data, photo messages, landline calls and more.
Direct Debit – All tariffs and prices provided assume that you will be paying your bill by direct debit and accept electronic online billing. This is the best value way to pay for mobile phone contracts, and different mobile phone networks charge different and variable amounts for paper billing or cash/cheque/debit/credit card payments, so we’ve done our best to keep it simple.
Cash-back – There are two ways you can get cash back after signing up for a mobile phone contract.
- Automatic cash-back - You automatically receive a credit on your mobile phone bill. This can be all at once or paid in installments over the life of the mobile phone contract.
- Cash-back by redemption - This involves a manual application process which you will need to comply with to receive cash-back. This can involve claiming your cash-back on a weekly, monthly, quarterly, semi-annual or annual basis, possibly by post or online or email or phone (or even a combination).
At present, Mobilife saving & deal calculations include automatic cash-back payments but exclude cashback by redemption. We believe this is a fair way of presenting the cash-back deals available to consumers who sometimes fail to claim cashback by redemption.
Sort Orders
There are currently seven ways the deals we find you can be presented. We realise this is potentially confusing – here’s an explanation:
Total contract (default)
The total contract sort order takes into account the cost of the handset.
The formula used is as follows:
Up-front cost for the phone + (monthly cost x number of contract months).
Monthly price x contract months + mobile phone cost) / the term of the contract.
This ensures that deals where a handset is free and a deal where the handset incurs an upfront one off cost are ordered correctly and consistently.
Monthly Cost
The monthly cost simply orders the deals in order of expected monthly cost which includes the line
rental and any predicted charges for usage over and above what is included in your allowance such as non geographical
calls, international minutes and text, premium rate messages etc.
Handset Cost
The cost of the phone in increasing price so phones with no upfront fee are at the top of the deal list.
Most Minutes
The deals with the highest number of inclusive any time any network minutes will appear at the top of
the list descending as you scroll down.
Most Texts
The deals with the highest number of inclusive texts will appear at the top of the list descending as
you scroll down.
Most Data
The deals with the highest inclusive data will appear at the top of the list descending as you scroll
down.
Most Cashback
The deals with the highest cash-back, either automatic cash-back or cash-back by redemption (treated
equally) will appear at the top of the list, descending as you scroll down.
Bill Analyser Beta
As some networks and tariffs give you better deals when you call people on the same network (known as on-net calls), we think it is important to take this into account when finding the best deal for you; if you make lots of calls to friends on the same network, this could make a big difference in your monthly bills.
So to do this, we take the top 10 numbers from your average bill (based on call duration and number of text messages sent) and we count these as your “favourite numbers”. If you could benefit from being on a different deal based on these, we include this in our results.
For the other numbers on your bill, we assume that your calls to different mobile phone networks
follow UK nation-wide averages which are:
Vodafone: 24.34%
O2: 27.31%
T-Mobile: 16.64%
Orange: 24.97%
Three: 5.72%
Virgin: 1.02%
Calls to landlines and voicemail are categorised differently.