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Dissatisfied wireless customers got their due last week.

After years of complaints about early-termination fees, the Federal Communications Commission finally showed signs of a serious inquiry into the charges. And the shortcomings of AT&T Wireless’ network, familiar to disgruntled iPhone users, drew wide attention for an ironic reason: Apple’s decision to stick with AT&T when it launches its eagerly awaited iPad mobile computer this spring.

But today’s column isn’t about dissatisfied wireless customers. It’s about the vast majority of the nation’s 276 million wireless subscribers who are at least modestly happy with a technology that has changed so many aspects of their day-to-day lives.

Happy, I’d venture, but for one thing: their monthly bills.

CTIA, an industry group that tracks that astounding number of subscribers, says they bring in an average of about $550 a year in revenue, or a total of $151 billion.

If you feel like you’re contributing a little too much to that pie, you may find help from a Texas start-up, Validas, and its Web site: www.MyValidas.com.

Validas has just 10 employees, and its online tool has an occasional rough edge. But it’s easy to see why it’s already finding a niche in evaluating bills for consumers, businesses, and even one of the major national carriers. Validas helps customers live up to its motto: “Fight back against your cell phone bill!”

How it works

For the techno-literate, using MyValidas is fairly simple. If you already manage your bill online, all you have to do is save it as a PDF file and upload that to the site. Alternatively, you can ask MyValidas to use your log-in and import your bill.

For free, MyValidas will give you a basic analysis of your potential savings, along with tips on how to save money by avoiding needless charges.

For example, it will flag calls to 411, which cost close to $2 each. (Its tip, which you may have read about here before: Use one of the free, ad-supported services instead, such as 1-800-373-3411 – also known as 1-800-FREE-411.)

MyValidas will also look for charges for services that subscribers may not really want, such as $2.99 a month that several carriers charge for “Roadside Assistance.”

“Sometimes, people are mistakenly signed up,” says Validas cofounder Todd Dunphy. As someone who started nine years ago with Verizon in one of its retail stores and worked his way up to managing large accounts, Dunphy knows how such mistakes are made.

But MyValidas’ greatest value is for those who buy its full-fledged service – something Dunphy says visitors do more than half the time when the free analysis shows more than $5 a month in savings. The service costs just $5 for an individual or family subscriber, “so it’s a basic return-on-investment calculation,” he says.

Those customers will see how MyValidas slices and dices their bills, using its analytical software and, crucially, its access to the national phone-number database.

The most common problem it identifies? Customers who overbuy or underbuy when choosing a basic plan.

Those who underbuy subject themselves to what Sprint used to call “ugly overages”: high per-minute charges for calls, per-message fees for texts, or per-kilobyte charges for data. Those who overbuy throw away dollars each month, too, by paying for more service than they actually need – even with a sizable margin of error.

MyValidas doesn’t just identify your mistakes. It tells you how to fix them, based on your specific usage patterns.

Perhaps you’d benefit by switching to a service such as Sprint’s “Any Mobile, Anytime” plan, which offers unlimited calls to any wireless number. Or maybe all you need is to make a change at your current carrier – say, to a plan that starts nighttime calls at 7 p.m. instead of 9.

To make the process simpler, MyValidas even includes an “e-mail wizard.” With the touch of a button, you can ask your carrier to make changes it recommends.

A guinea pig’s savings

I tried out Validas’ online tool last week. I suspected my family wasted money on wireless service, but was surprised when MyValidas said we could save $40 a month by switching to a lower-cost AT&T plan – a little less than the $51 in savings MyValidas identifies on an average bill.

Could I have figured that out myself? Undoubtedly, since MyValidas’ basic recommendation was that I take advantage of a service that AT&T has introduced since we opened our account: its “A List,” which enables subscribers to get unmetered calls to the handful of other carriers’ wireless numbers they call most frequently.

Dunphy said such recommendations reflect one of MyValidas’ key strengths: its ability to analyze your bill in light of the steady stream of changes in plans offered by the nation’s largest carriers. (If you use a prepaid, flat-fee service such as Cricket or Metro PCS, MyValidas cannot help.)

“When carriers introduce new plans, the one thing they never do is communicate to their users whether they’d be beneficial to them,” he says.

Dunphy doesn’t accuse the carriers of anything untoward. Contrary to the developers’ expectations, actual errors in rating calls have shown up in fewer than 1 percent of the one million account records Validas has analyzed since its 2007 launch.

Instead, Dunphy believes the problem is that the carriers are focused on building their businesses and maintaining market share against the steady churn of customers lured by competitors.

“They’re all about networks, devices, and services,” he says. “The bill just isn’t a top priority.”

For many consumers, though, the bill is just that: a priority. If you’re in that category, you may want to give MyValidas.com a try.

[Thanks: http://www.philly.com ]

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