Orange PAYG Dolphin - Usage problem

richyg

Hi ,

Yesterday I got an Orange San Francisco on payg and rang up Orange to put £20 credit on the phone and ask to be put on the dolphin contract for 100Mb free per month when you top up £10 or more.

Excited about my new purchase I looked at the funcitons including the mapping - Orange Wednesdays and looking at 2 news sites bbc and cnn - looking at 3 or 4 pages in total.

I then set up my Orange account and was stunned to find that 5 minutes after using the phone the balance was £1.80

Having rang Orange on 450 they have said that I have used the phone before the inclusive contract has kicked in - which it did an hour later and have charged me at £4 per Mb for my usage before then.

They are considering a refund but I wont hold my breath. However I think it stinks to follow the guide which says top up and ask to be put on dolphin for your free internet usage. They never mentioned waiting for a text which can apparently take up to 72 hours.

However my question is that how in 3 minutes of internet usage on 2 web sites could I have used 4 Mb. ?

Could it be the donwloading of data for something else ? eg the mapping software ?

The one stroke of good fortune is that my download of Angry Birds which is 18 Meg - began a few minutes later else that would have cost £72 !!!!!! :eek:


Am I doing something wrong - as I dont think this 100Mb is going to last very long . I am now aware that downloads of apps should be done on wifi - but am still wondering how standard internet browsing can use so much .

How much would I expect pages on the bbc to use up. ?

Thank in advance and regards Rich G

Jon_01

The mapping data is huge, that's where your credits gone.

They messed up my wife's as well (also an OSF) and in 30 min's she used £28.00 of credit using Google maps driving around Manchester.

MorrisonsEmployee

This is the one reason i switched from Orange PAYG to T-Mobile contract - I use a lot of data and was just finding their's incredibly expensive on PAYG, It is correct what they have said though that you cannot use the internet without being charged until your package has kicked in - It would have been nice for them to tell you this though!

Orange PAYG do sell data bundles for £5 but i was finding i was using these's really quickly aswell even though i was usually only checking Facebook etc, - However i had a iPhone 3GS at the time [Now have an iPhone 4] and the problem seems to be that all the smartphones are so data hungry that your data is in use all the time and gets eaten up really quickly.

MorrisonsEmployee

Also just be aware that you won't be told when you have used your 100MB up [You can check this yourself but won't recieve an automatic text message or anything!] - I found this out to my cost when i topped up £20 thinking i still had some of my previous allowance left and like you after a short space of time had less than £1 credit!:eek:

grumbler

richyg wrote: »

Excited about my new purchase I looked at the funcitons including the mapping - Orange Wednesdays and looking at 2 news sites bbc and cnn - looking at 3 or 4 pages in total.

You could have done the same for free on your home WiFi if you have it.

MorrisonsEmployee

grumbler wrote: »

You could have done the same for free on your home WiFi if you have it.

Valid point but people are usally keen to check out the network's internet connection when buying a new phone or going with a new network and not expect it to cost them £18.20 when they believe they have 100MB of data to use.

richyg

Thanks for all your comments. Agree that I was only just trying out the functionality and not using it in anger which is why I was so surprised.

Would 3 or so news pages with pictures on them really equate to 4 to 5 Mb - surely on that reckoning 75 web pages would be 100Mb ?

If that is the case I will have to take the browser off just in case my wife who the phone is for doesnt realise she is using 3g as opposed to wifi.

Good job I didnt put on £100 to set her up for a few months.

Thanks and all the best.

Maybe I will unlock it and get a sim only deal of some sort.

Thanks Rich

grumbler

Was it not £4/Mb and £1.80 in total?

richyg wrote: »

Excited about my new purchase I looked at the funcitons including the mapping - Orange Wednesdays and looking at 2 news sites bbc and cnn - looking at 3 or 4 pages in total.

I then set up my Orange account and was stunned to find that 5 minutes after using the phone the balance was £1.80

Having rang Orange on 450 they have said that I have used the phone before the inclusive contract has kicked in - which it did an hour later and have charged me at £4 per Mb for my usage before then.

MorrisonsEmployee

richyg wrote: »

Maybe I will unlock it and get a sim only deal of some sort.

Thanks Rich

I have mentioned it on here loads already but there are 2 great SIM only deals at the moment which iv mentioned below - Also there are free unlock codes online for the phone.

Carphone Warehouse - £5.11 per month [Rolling 30 day contract - 100 minutes, 100 texts, 100MB]

T-Mobile - £6 per month [Rolling 30 day contract - 100 minutes, 100 texts, 500MB]

neil40

I would get it unlocked & flee orange to Giffgaff for unlimited net/250 uk mins & umlimited texts £10 per month.

MorrisonsEmployee

neil40 wrote: »

flee orange to Giffgaff for unlimited net/250 uk mins & umlimited texts £10 per month.

However be aware before rushing to GiffGaff they seem to be have horrendous problems with calls dropping and data connection which is well documented on their own official forum - They also released this update regarding the matter -

Service Update [05/04/2011]

We are aware there are issues with the data traffic on our network. Some people are having a problems with Slow Data Speeds throughout the UK which we’re trying to fix now.

We are working together with O2 to try and fix this.

The impact of this is that giffgaff customers are experiencing slow data speeds when trying to connect to GPRS

We will keep you updated with any extra information we can get.