CUB Cellphone Saver Wins 'Industry Excellence Award,' Online Tool Cutting Bills by Average of $300 a Year

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Feb 18, 2010, 02:53 ET

CHICAGO, Feb. 18 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The Citizens Utility Board (CUB) has captured a 2010 Industry Excellence Award for the CUB Cellphone Saver, an online tool that has been showing Illinois wireless customers how to save an average of $300 a year.

The Cellphone Saver (www.CUBCellphoneSaver.com), which was created in 2008 in a partnership with Houston-based Validas (www.MyValidas.com), won the "Enterprise Project of the Year" award at a conference of telecommunications-management professionals: AOTMP's Telecom Environment Management 2010. AOTMP, based in Indianapolis, provides guidance on best telecom management practices and this week gave out Industry Excellence Awards.

At the conference, a representative from CUB and a representative of Coca-Cola Enterprises made short presentations describing a project and how it led to telecommunications savings. Members of the audience then voted on the best project of the year.

"Awards are nice, and CUB is proud to win," CUB Executive Director David Kolata said. "But we're most proud of having an online tool that's saving families hundreds of dollars a year on their cell-phone bills. Illinois consumers are the real winners here."

The CUB Cellphone Saver allows Illinois consumers to upload an online copy of their wireless bills and within seconds it can provide a detailed report showing consumers if there is a better plan, for their usage, among the top five wireless carriers: AT&T, Verizon, Sprint (and Nextel), T-Mobile and U.S. Cellular. It also will weed out potentially needless charges on a consumer's current bill.

Over an 11-month period from 2008 to 2009, the CUB Cellphone Saver analyzed nearly 7,000 wireless bills and was able to recommend savings on 73 percent of them. Of those bills, the tool found that the average consumer was overpaying by $27.61 a month, or $331.32 a year.

The majority of bills analyzed included unused, paid minutes, with the average user wasting 439 minutes a month. That's almost a workday of wasted minutes, and the equivalent of a phone conversation lasting an entire flight from Chicago to Iceland.

CUB is Illinois' leading nonprofit utility watchdog organization. Created by the Illinois Legislature, CUB opened its doors in 1984 to represent the interests of residential and small-business utility customers. Since then, CUB has saved consumers more than $10 billion by helping to block rate hikes and secure refunds. For more information, call CUB's Consumer Hotline at 1-800-669-5556 or visit CUB's award-winning website, www.CitizensUtilityBoard.org.

SOURCE Citizens Utility Board