£700 T-mobile bill for data roaming ACCIDENTALLY left on....

RishiC

My fiance and I went to India this month for 10 days, and she was sure she turned off the data on her iPhone. She had not used it for any internet services what so ever and only really used it for listening to music and a handful of very short calls.

We got back on Saturday and yesterday her phone got cut. When she rang t-mobile to find out why, to her horror they said she has hit the £700 limit!!!

Is there anything we can do? Any advice - she didnt even use any data services, and surely there should be some limit or cap, even outside of Europe??? Any advice would be great.

jamespir

RishiC wrote: »

My fiance and I went to India this month for 10 days, and she was sure she turned off the data on her iPhone. She had not used it for any internet services what so ever and only really used it for listening to music and a handful of very short calls.

We got back on Saturday and yesterday her phone got cut. When she rang t-mobile to find out why, to her horror they said she has hit the £700 limit!!!

Is there anything we can do? Any advice - she didnt even use any data services, and surely there should be some limit or cap, even outside of Europe??? Any advice would be great.

no there is nothing you can do you left it on you should be responsible

theres no caps for outside europe as you use the local network in india and t-mobile have to pay them


my advice would be to see if they would take 10% off as good will they may they may not

RishiC

Even if it was left on, no services were ever used! facebook was not accessed once, no searches on any web browsers, no app's used, absolutely nothing.

A mistake on our part, we can accept, but the charges are absolutely ludicrous. Being a customer of T-mobile for over 15 years, i would accept some sort of compassion. And that i will be pushing for. Im sure there are many others that have been stung the same way.

jamespir wrote: »

no there is nothing you can do you left it on you should be responsible

theres no caps for outside europe as you use the local network in india and t-mobile have to pay them


my advice would be to see if they would take 10% off as good will they may they may not

jamespir

RishiC wrote: »

Even if it was left on, no services were ever used! facebook was not accessed once, no searches on any web browsers, no app's used, absolutely nothing.

A mistake on our part, we can accept, but the charges are absolutely ludicrous. Being a customer of T-mobile for over 15 years, i would accept some sort of compassion. And that i will be pushing for. Im sure there are many others that have been stung the same way.

the phone is always connected to the roaming/internet wheter you use it or not ( so that you can connect really fast ) and the phone connects to the mast every few seconds so the mast knows where it is and so you can still recieve calls /texts also the apps update all the time especially facebook and would connect reguarly to see if you had any new posts
in the uk they dont charge you for your phone telling the local mast where it is
but when you go abroad they do charge for roaming at a cost of £10 per mb and that is what you have been charged for if you had turned the roaming off then you would not have been charged

i doubt youll get anything of tmobile they may budge a little but you would probaly still have to pay 400-500 pounds

RishiC

jamespir wrote: »

the phone is always connected to the roaming/internet wheter you use it or not ( so that you can connect really fast ) and the phone connects to the mast every few seconds so the mast knows where it is and so you can still recieve calls /texts also the apps update all the time especially facebook and would connect reguarly to see if you had any new posts
in the uk they dont charge you for your phone telling the local mast where it is
but when you go abroad they do charge for roaming at a cost of £10 per mb and that is what you have been charged for if you had turned the roaming off then you would not have been charged

i doubt youll get anything of tmobile they may budge a little but you would probaly still have to pay 400-500 pounds

Thanks for the advice. I guess even a couple of £100's off would be something. Will give them a push.

movilogo

smart phone + dumb user = ££££ waste

chrispafc

It sounds to me like an error on the part of a customer. On an Android (here we go again), there is a widget you can add to your desktop that will switch off data roaming. It is not T-Mobile's fault.

jamespir

movilogo wrote: »

smart phone + dumb user = ££££ waste

there seem to be more and more as phones get cleverer i think phone companies should do more to highlight customer to the dangers and costs of using their phones abroad because people are being charged a fair whack

this guy was lucky in a way ive seen people with £3000-£81000 pound bills
ok the latter was cause he used it as a modem and decided to download a few four gig films
maybe they could do an app that at a click shuts it off for roaming

chrispafc

jamespir wrote: »

there seem to be more and more as phones get cleverer i think phone companies should do more to highlight customer to the dangers and costs of using their phones abroad because people are being charged a fair whack

this guy was lucky in a way ive seen people with £3000-£81000 pound bills
ok the latter was cause he used it as a modem and decided to download a few four gig films
maybe they could do an app that at a click shuts it off for roaming

There are apps out there to do that. The Iphone should have an option to disable data roaming. It is the responsibility of the phone user to ensure they do their research about mobile phone charges before they travel abroad.

Playing ignorance is no excuse.

NFH

RishiC wrote: »

she was sure she turned off the data on her iPhone.

Unless you can provide reasonable evidence that she did, for example a screenshot showing data roaming turned off with the Indian network name at the top of the screen, then your best bet is to ask T-Mobile to recalculate the bill as if you had bought T-Mobile's most favourable data roaming bundles in advance.

movilogo

think phone companies should do more to highlight customer to the dangers and costs of using their phones abroad

But why would they? They make huge profit from this. Why blame networks when dumb users can't operate their smart phones?

If you want to use your phone abroad either put a local SIM or put your normal SIM in a dumb phone. If you install hundreds of apps in your phone, you can never be sure which one is still using your data.

All smart phones offer options to switch of internet. If users don't use the options who's at fault??