O2 line rental charges

RedBern

My daughter had an O2 contract from Sept 04 - upgraded her 'phone last September and was paying £15 monthly line rental (a reduction from £25 they originally wanted to charge) plus £4.99 insurance. Her contract was for 12 months. This months bill has arrived - for £39.66 which she has queried and received the following response from O2:

"The charge of £39.66 appearing on your bill dated 01 October 2006 includes:
A charge of £4.99 for insurance
A charge of £21.28 (excluding Value Added Tax) for the monthly line rental
An additional line rental charge of £8.23 (excluding VAT)
A charge of £5.16 for VAT

On this bill, you were not charged for your usage, as you did not exceed your
free monthly allowances.

You were promised a £10.00 (including VAT) monthly line rental discount for 12months when you firstly upgraded your account on 03 August 2005 with the Sony Ericsson K700i. Though you returned this phone and upgraded again with the Sony Ericsson K750i but the line rental discount was not removed from your account.

A £10.00 monthly line rental discount was added to your account on 01 September 2005 and it was removed from your account on 01 September 2006. This is the reason you did not receive the monthly on your current bill and were charged £25.00 (including VAT) for your tariff.

On your bill dated 01 September 2006, you received the monthly line rental
discount for the period 01 September 2006 to 30 September 2006.

As you should not have received the line rental discount for the period 02
September 2006 to 30 September 2006, an additional line rental charge of £8.23 (excluding VAT) was applied to your current bill.

I am sorry but we do not alert our customers about their contract end date."

As a student, she was expecting her usual £20 bill - so this doubling of the cost is scary. Can O2 just increase this line rental without warning? Any advice gratefully received....

oranabana

Hi, something similar happened to me, where Orange this time, started charging me GBP 25.00 instead of the usual 15.00 a month. When I querried this, they told me that the 'discount' to 15.00 was only for 12 months (something I was not made aware of at any point).

the confusing thing was that the 'discount' had defaulted to the full amount after 18 months not 12. The response was that they had made a mistake.

I argued with them about the fact that I was not informed about this and eventually they re-applied the discount, but at the same time told me that they are thereby giving me notice of the new rental of 25.00.

Needless to say I went to another network - with PAC. The future certainly ain't orange! I reckon you ought to advise them that you have not received any infomration about the end of the 'promo' period...

fiish

The discount deduction in the previous O2 bills would have been listed as something like '£10 Discount - 12 months' or similar, which would have made it quite clear that the discount would only be lasting that long.

A 12 month contract means a minimum length of 12 months; there is no maximum so there's technically no absolute expiry date. Therefor they're not obligated to tell you when the minimum period is about to end (and why should they? It's more profit for them if a customer goes on without upgrading their phone or demanding a retention discount)