Massive Phone Bill despite buying an EU Bundle -SETTLED UPDATE

m0nkeymrs01

First of all thank you so much to those that offered help and advice, I have settled my bill with Orange today after they reduced it by more than half.

Spurred on by a few of your stories and Watchdogs report http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/watchdog/2011/09/data_roaming.html I called Orange, before I even pressed they said they would reduce by £70, I said I wasnt happy with that and they said they will reduce by £100, I said I still was not happy and wanted it esculated. I was told a managed would call me within 24 hours. 36 hours later I had heard nothing and so chased them, I spoke with a manager and he agreed to reduce by £186. I was very happy with this, I was anticipating and had planned for my bill to be around £150. I settled the bill on the phone today and all is now well.

My advice to those in my position is not to be afraid to ring and discuss with Orange. I had bullet points written down about why I felt justified in arguing and when they shrugged me off I just went back to them. I particularly argued at which point I had opted out of the 50EUR block and when I was told about this (I genuinely had no idea) as I believed if they had told me I would have been able to make an informed choice. Orange's own statement to Watchdog say they aim to be transparent, transparent does not include (in my eyes) witholding information such as that.

To those that say tough and learn your lesson, that attitude does not help people that come to "moneysavingexpert" to save money and seek advice, on this occasion thank you to those people that did help me to save money.

spiro

Would you drive a car that had no fuel gauge? I'm guessing you would all answer no because "I wouldn't know when I was going to run out of petrol".

However you are perfectly happy to use a mobile phone abroad (iPhones are the worst for this) when you have no way of measuring what you have used. You could have used 3mb of your daily limit or 300mb.

c-m

I use a motorvehicle without a fuel gauge. I could tell you exactly how much fuel in litres is left in it and how many miles I have done or have left to do. :P

NoWayJose

Good to hear!

I have read alot of "Its all your fault" posts on here, and sometimes that's very true, but each situation can be very different.

esuhl

spiro wrote: »

Would you drive a car that had no fuel gauge?

However you are perfectly happy to use a mobile phone abroad... when you have no way of measuring what you have used.

But... Isn't that exactly the same as using your phone in this country?! How many people can look at a web page and reliably estimate how many bytes of data your phone downloaded?

And what if you were stuck in a tent in Spain in the middle of nowhere and wanted to use a car. After walking for miles you see a car rental place and find out that, although the cars are cheap to hire, they have no fuel gauges... but there's no other way to leave the area. Would you really say, "Oh well, let's live here forever, then." or "Sod it - I'll try to guestimate how much petrol I'm using and take a risk."?

With mobile phones as technologically advanced as they are, manufacturers and network operators really should have come up with a way (and should have been given incentives) to ensure that customers are fully aware of charges as they incur them. It wouldn't be unfeasible for phones to be able to programmed with tariff charges, etc. (in the same way that internet access settings are sent via text message and stored on the phone) so that a daily running total could appear on-screen.

m0nkeymrs01 wrote: »

What is 100MB anyway? In simpleton terms? Five plain text emails? Ten minutes on FB?

100MB represents 104,857,600 plain text ASCII characters (i.e. about 150,000 plain text emails with an average of 100 six-letter words) OR about a fifth of a CD OR about one forty-fifth [i.e. ~2%] of a DVD OR 120 photos at 3.1 megapixels OR two MP3 albums encoded at 128kb/s OR loading the default page at facebook.com when no login cookie exists 566 times (actually logging in will probably cause much more data to be transmitted - at a guess maybe only 150 or 200 page loads would be possible before exceeding 100MB).

m0nkeymrs01

spiro wrote: »

Would you drive a car that had no fuel gauge? I'm guessing you would all answer no because "I wouldn't know when I was going to run out of petrol".

However you are perfectly happy to use a mobile phone abroad (iPhones are the worst for this) when you have no way of measuring what you have used. You could have used 3mb of your daily limit or 300mb.

No I wouldnt but in my case I think you are missing the point... anticipating that I would not know how much data I use I telephoned Orange and asked them to advise me. Now they could have done several things, one of which was point me in the direction of a data counter... they didnt do this. They could have advised me about the 50EUR cap...they didnt do this. They could have sold me an adequate data bundle... they didnt do this.

I guess, if I was going to buy a car without the petrol guage I would ask the sales person how many miles it normally does on a full tank etc...If he says 350miles then I filled up and got 5miles down the road and it ran out of fuel I would be peed off at the salesman for mis-selling/not being honest.

Guys_Dad

Your opening post contained the following

I know I did use my phone so please dont shout at me saying I shouldnt have used it but I feel that the bundle may have been mis-sold to me 30MB doesnt mean anything to me, I told the man on the phone the sort of thing I intended to use and he sold me the 30b a day bundle... how can I have gone so massively over?

With the benefit of hindsight, you must have known how much data your contract gave you each month in the UK. I guess 500mb or more. ( If you don't know that, then ignore the rest of this post as there isn't much I can advise) And you may be using more if you have £85 bills each month.

Then surely if you knew that, then to accept 30mb for a 2 week holiday must have rung some bells in your head? Well, of course, it didn't or you wouldn't have started this thread.

Glad you have got a result and hopefully you will have learned a bit more about Iphones so that you don't get a big bill next time.