iPhone abroad & excessive data charges

Rachjones

Hello, I'm looking for some advice, perhaps this has happened to other people on the forum, and you can guide me.

I currently have an iPhone on contract with orange.
I wanted to take it abroad and use it in the states. The day before I flew out I rang orange and requested their travel data bundle, so I could search the Internet occasionally and keep in touch with home.
The rep I spoke to added my request and told me to avoid excessive charges I needed to turn data roaming off.

When I get to the states, if I wanted to use the 3G network of AT&T I had to turn on data roaming, but this went against what I had been told to do. Not wanting to incur a lengthy phone call charge, I emailled customer service for advice - using the wifi that was freely available.
At this point, I am being wary as to what I should connect to, so the phone is in airplane mode, with data roaming off, 3G set to off and all push notifications and anything else I can switch off, is off, and I force the connection to wifi.

This is how the settings pretty much remain during my holiday as I have no response from customer services until 6 days later, and I am sat in the airport lounge ready to go home.
I do occasionally switch on data roaming so I am able to use the map feature, but it is very quickly turned off and the phone returned to airplane mode.

I have just checked my account to find that I have £136 worth of data charges. Unfortunately as it is "unhooked" customer services can not tell me how much I have downloaded, but can tell me that I have several lengthy session times, some up to 1000 minutes, that's nearly 17 hours. I was shocked and explained how I had set my phone up to be told:
"sometimes when you turn on wifi, this turns on data roaming, and so you can be charged".

This has literally stunned me. I believed that i had limited my data usage, and stuck soley to using the Internet when I had access to wifi.

Has anybody got an explanation as to how turning wifi can turn on data roaming, when it is off by default? I can't find information on it, and if this is known by the reps to happen, should i have been told "don't turn on data roaming to avoid excessive charges - and be careful with wifi -that can turn it on too"?
My bill is created on the 12th, when I have to ring back and question how i have managed to rack up such a huge bill when I thought I was being so careful.

Would really appreciate any help or ideas as to what I can ask the rep I speak to on the 12th to try and sort this out reasonably. Its not the fault of the rep I speak to after the event, so I don't want to have a go at them, but I do want to get my point across.

Thank you.

R

Wintermute

What version of iOS is on your iPhone (settings > general > about > read what's next to version), there's a well know issue with the 4.0x version of the software, that was resolved in 4.1 that basically meant the data roaming setting would not do anything. If you phoned up before going abroad and asked Orange for advise about using your phone and adding some sort of data bundle and they didn't mention this you might have a case against them to get it credited back.

Dig deeper and ask for some sort of investigation into the data usage to say whether that data originated from your phone, it may take some time, but they'll have a procedure for doing this although there's a good chance the data did originate from your phone.

One thing that really strikes me about your post is you said they can't tell you how much data you used, if they don't know this they can't charge you for using it, session times mean nothing, for example 10 minutes on facebook uses next to no data compared to 10 minutes on youtube. I'd seriously question this if they're unable to give you an idea of how much data you actually used.

Rachjones

Thank you Wintermute,
My iPhone is version 4.2.1 so that possibly rules out the data roaming bug fix for earlier versions.
I am definately not going to let this lie, but I have to wait until my bill is created so the reps can "see" the data on the system. This is the reason they told me that they can not help me until the 12th, as although they can see the session times, they can not see the data usage linked to it.

What has really annoyed me is that the rep I first spoke to said that although I can turn off data roaming, by switching on wifi this can turn data roaming on and cause the charges.
If this is known by the orange reps, surely they should mention this when you enquire about data bundles, they told me about the turning off data roaming (which, yes, would save my charges, but made my phone usuable - the email response from customer services - which turned up at the end lf my holiday - told me to turn data roaming on!) so why not a warning about wifi usage? If they had, I would have thought twice about using the wifi - or possibly just taken the sim out my phone....

Thanks for the reply, Im just trying to arm myself with as much info to ask them come the 12th, investigating the actual data usage is going to be the main one at the moment!

jayme1

Rachjones wrote: »

What has really annoyed me is that the rep I first spoke to said that although I can turn off data roaming, by switching on wifi this can turn data roaming on and cause the charges.

no this is a plain lie, if the 'data roaming' setting is in the 'off' position then you have to personally turn it back on yourself.
there is no way turning on wifi can turn this setting back on, whether your phone was connected to the network or esp. if it was in airplane mode.

the only other thing I can say is you said you turned on data roaming to use google maps, this can easily account for very large data usage (a simple matter of zooming in from space to where you are and then moving the map around (esp any form of zooming) can easily use 20/30/40MB+) and you said you did this a few times, taking into the fact that abroad data bundles are normally only about 4MB and you have one heafty bill on your hands.

tazdevil01985

jayme1 wrote: »

no this is a plain lie, if the 'data roaming' setting is in the 'off' position then you have to personally turn it back on yourself.
there is no way turning on wifi can turn this setting back on, whether your phone was connected to the network or esp. if it was in airplane mode.

the only other thing I can say is you said you turned on data roaming to use google maps, this can easily account for very large data usage (a simple matter of zooming in from space to where you are and then moving the map around (esp any form of zooming) can easily use 20/30/40MB+) and you said you did this a few times, taking into the fact that abroad data bundles are normally only about 4MB and you have one heafty bill on your hands.

Did you recieve any picture messages when you were abroad ?
With regards to not seeing until your bill is created thats bs ! Fronline are just fobbing you off. All transactions create CDR (Call Duration Records) which are usually processed within 24 hours from you making the call/GPRS etc abroad

d123

tazdevil01985 wrote: »

Did you recieve any picture messages when you were abroad ?

Considering it's free to receive picture messages while roaming they would not have an affect on his data roaming, but as a previous poster has said, multiple uses of Google Maps can (and would have) racked up significant data use.

Roaming charges

Rachjones

Thanks for all the replies. I've got the feeling that it's going to be the use of google maps that is going to be the root of the problem, especially as it seems to be data heavy.
As for picture messages, I didn't send or receive any - I also had my voicemail switched off as a friend had mentioned that too me. This would have come under my text / call charges not data. I have got some text charges, which I was expecting, as we were in the USA when the snow hit the UK and planes were being cancelled left right and centre. The cost of these texts is relatively small (£6) and I was expecting this, it's the data charge I wasn't expecting, nor understand how I have managed to do this.

Thank you for you replies, it certainly has cleared my mind up as to the wifi "overriding" the data roaming, as what I initially thought - complete rubbish.

Will post back on here after the 12th with what came from the phone call...

AlexChambers

Hi Rach,
I had a similar thing happen with an iPhone on 02 a couple of years ago when I visited Rome for a a day or two. Conscious of all the problems being reported with international roaming charges I made sure I turned off data roaming. However, in need of directions to a hotel late one night I turned on data to use Google Maps and turned it off again a few minutes later (having been unsuccessful as the iPhone would not load the page!). Needless to say, I received a bill similar to yours on return and queried it with 02.

02 credited all data charges because I pointed out that it appeared that it appeared they were charging the "header size" of all the emails in my Inbox (since you cannot turn data on selectively just to use the internet and leave email off - not that you would think about it unless you knew about this) rather than the actual size of the data downloaded (I think my iPhone was set to download the first 5k of the message).

Since I was a printer at the time quite a few of my emails went into Megabytes resulting in an interesting bill so I suggest you check your charges against data downloaded by using the email program on your PC or Mac to calculate the sizes of the emails you may have been charged for as opposed to actual data downloaded which, in theory, is what you should be charged for.

02 never replied to my query about the international call charging system and gave me a credit and a generic reply saying that they could only work on the figures that the foreign network reported. I would be interested to know if it is the same now.

tazdevil01985

d123 wrote: »

Considering it's free to receive picture messages while roaming they would not have an affect on his data roaming, but as a previous poster has said, multiple uses of Google Maps can (and would have) racked up significant data use.

Roaming charges

Yes you are correct however when you recieve an MMS it asks you to turn data roaming on to recieve that was all I was trying to establish

NFH

My Orange bill similarly showed that I had used data that I hadn't used. My bill showed that I had used 916MB but my iPhone recorded that I had used only 404.5MB (370MB downloaded and 34.5MB uploaded). Orange's billing system showed that I had downloaded large quantities of data during short daytime periods on two days in my billing month, which if true would have severely drained my battery, but it hadn't done so because I didn't use the data. Also there's no way that my iPhone could have physically downloaded the alleged high quantity of data in the short periods stated. The difference in my case was that it was fortunately in the UK and just within the fair usage allowance so there was no cost or other implication. Nevertheless I asked Orange to investigate several times and made sure that copious notes were made on my account in case the same thing should happen in future when I'm roaming, but they failed to investigate. I'm sure Orange know all about these data billing errors but won't admit it. If these errors can happen in the UK, they can also happen when roaming. Don't give up until Orange reimburse you in full.