Departments reveal mobile device spending

The Department for Transport spent £1.5m on mobile telephones and related data services in the 2010-11 financial year. The department, which has seven executive agencies, disclosed that 7,757 officials were issued with mobile phones such as BlackBerrys and other 3G devices in that year. The department was responding to a …

[Andy in London]

irony

I'm chuckling at the irony of an O2 advert on the same page of the source article. In quoting £13.50 a month this means that DoT could have saved £300k pa. staggeringly DoH could have saved £500k - as they say - DoH!

[Is it me?]

Doubt it

The costs covered will include the costs of managing the mobile devices, and I suspect they are bought, not rolled into a service charge, and then there's the BES servers, and encrypted phones, which ain't cheap.

[Christoph]

How much was replacement?

How much of that was new spend, and how much for replacing gadgets left in the backs of taxis while loaded with confidential and secret data?

[Mark 65]

Taxi fodder

At least they have the sense to be issuing Blackberries. I just hope with all these handsets out there that there is some decent bulk buy bargaining going on.

[Turtle_Fan]

@ Andy

If it's ironic then I can't see it (blame the lunchtime drinks or lack of sleep).

Sub-£200 (mostly) yearly spend all-in doesn't sound too bad to me. That averages 16 quid a month.

Bearing in mind that many of those sets would be engaged in international and roaming calls, it really doesn't sound much at all.

Even considering UKG's big-customer status.