bill dispute with orange

fairman

Hey everyone, feeling pretty stuck on this one.

went to New zealand for 3weeks to get married, wanted to use our iPhones data roaming as had done most of wedding planning from the mac, iPad, iPhones etc. Myself and my wife have both phones on her contract, switched from blackberrys to iPhones a few weeks before we left for NZ.

Phoned orange to enquire about data bundles, were told our previous monthly data usage had come to an average of 32mb/month, so based on this, we bought two 50mb bundles, 1 for each phone, were told this should be plenty, seeing as though we were only away 21days.

wifes phone got cut off in week 2,checked bills/usage while in NZ online, bill was sitting at £250, the next day £1800, phoned orange(usual lengthy wait, international call££), were told our bundles hadn't been loaded, call dropped here, but phone starts working again,bill back to £250. happy days.

get back to UK, wife has no money when at shop, £4500 direct debit taken out by orange.
phone orange- data usage definitely used, which we admitted, emails Facebook etc, man tells use usage amounts to approx 10-20mins youtube vids each, HE realises contract change from blackberrys, tells us its our fault for not informing the costumer services guy when we purchased the bundles, but is prepared to retrospectively sell us £350 worth of data bundles, to cover usage. I was keen to accept,make it go away,wife was not. Her reason, we were proactive, phoned the provider for advice, acted on the advice, which turned out to be misinformed advice, therefore Orange should take the hit. They disagreed,saying the first thing we should've done is tell them we switched handsets to high data usage handset, from a low data usage handset.
Our response, we are joe public,who have no idea an iPhone uses WAY more data than a blackberry (which we didn't),and that this should maybe have been the first thing the customer services guy did,check which contract we were on, or ask what sort of phones we are taking to nz.
He angrily refers the case to his manager, he makes it clear that he will be informing her we have declined the retrospective deal.
Anyway, £4500 bill arrived in mail, still 8months left on our contracts. Phones cut have been cut off. Loyal orange customers for 8years. NEVER missed a payment. We have switched providers.

What should we do now. My first instinct, flip them the bird and move to NZ. My second instinct,resolve the issue but stick to our guns,and pay what we believe we owe.

sorry for the essay, just want to give all the info.

grumbler

fairman wrote: »

went to New zealand for 3weeks to get married, wanted to use our iPhones data roaming as had done most of wedding planning from the mac, iPad, iPhones etc. Myself and my wife have both phones on her contract, switched from blackberrys to iPhones a few weeks before we left for NZ.

Phoned orange to enquire about data bundles, were told our previous monthly data usage had come to an average of 32mb/month,

Well, 32Mb looks very low even for a BB, but you cannot compare iPhone to BB in terms of the data consumption. It's like comparing a bus to a car. And it's not just iPhone. It's loads of Facebook and Youtube that you obviously didn't use much with your BBs and 32Mb/month. I don't see how you can blame the network.

so based on this, we bought two 50mb bundles, 1 for each phone, were told this should be plenty, seeing as though we were only away 21days.

I just like this 'only'. 21 days is a lot for data roaming.

phone orange- data usage definitely used, which we admitted, emails Facebook etc, man tells use usage amounts to approx 10-20mins youtube vids each, HE realises contract change from blackberrys, tells us its our fault for not informing the costumer services guy when we purchased the bundles,

I agree.

but is prepared to retrospectively sell us £350 worth of data bundles, to cover usage.

Very generous of them.

What should we do now. My first instinct, flip them the bird and move to NZ.

Not bad. Hope you lived separately from your relatives.

My second instinct,resolve the issue but stick to our guns,and pay what we believe we owe.

You owe what you spent, at least after the most generous bundle is applied. It's pretty clear.

NFH

Orange charge £10/GB for data in the UK (based on £5 for 500MB). They charge £8000/GB for data outside the EEA. Ask Orange to justify why their charge is 800 times more in New Zealand than in the UK. Vodafone would have charged you "only" £5 per day for data in New Zealand. Why do Orange charge so much more? Orange's data roaming charges are unreasonable.

Having said all this, you could reasonably be expected to have periodically checked your data usage on your iPhones to make sure you weren't going over your purchased 50MB bundles, despite Orange's advice before your trip. In other words, you had a degree of responsibility for the high charges.

I'd go along with the retrospective data bundles being applied, but state that you are accepting this temporarily under protest. Then pursue the matter further.

You'd have been even better off getting local SIM cards:
http://www.prepaidgsm.net/en/newzealand.php
http://prepaidwithdata.wikia.com/wiki/New_Zealand

NFH

fairman wrote: »

We have switched providers.

I hope you switched to Vodafone?

Buzby

Why do you believe a data bundle works when roaming? Unless I is an explicit arrangement with a particular stated overseas network, any data used abroad will be billed at the prevailing rate of the serving overseas network, ten passed to your local operator which adds its mark up - whic makes roamed data an expensive business.

As for leaving the debt behind, sure - but it'll show on your credit file as you do not start with a clean sheet, and then the DCAs come knocking.

Bette to get it sorted before you go.

NFH

Buzby wrote: »

Unless I is an explicit arrangement with a particular stated overseas network, any data used abroad will be billed at the prevailing rate of the serving overseas network, ten passed to your local operator which adds its mark up - whic makes roamed data an expensive business.

Retail rates for data around the world (for local customers) are typically around £0.01/MB; wholesale rates are lower. Therefore when Orange is paying a foreign network somewhere in the region of £0.01/MB, it is unreasonable to charge £8/MB. It's not a markup but a total rip-off, designed purely to fleece customers like the OP. Unlike other people who come into this forum complaining about data roaming charges (mostly concerning Orange), the OP did take some prior steps to prevent such a large bill.

Techhead_2

NFH wrote: »

Orange charge £10/GB for data in the UK (based on £5 for 500MB). They charge £8000/GB for data outside the EEA. Ask Orange to justify why their charge is 800 times more in New Zealand than in the UK. Vodafone would have charged you "only" £5 per day for data in New Zealand. Why do Orange charge so much more? Orange's data roaming charges are unreasonable.

Having said all this, you could reasonably be expected to have periodically checked your data usage on your iPhones to make sure you weren't going over your purchased 50MB bundles, despite Orange's advice before your trip. In other words, you had a degree of responsibility for the high charges.

I'd go along with the retrospective data bundles being applied, but state that you are accepting this temporarily under protest. Then pursue the matter further.

You'd have been even better off getting local SIM cards:
http://www.prepaidgsm.net/en/newzealand.php
http://prepaidwithdata.wikia.com/wiki/New_Zealand

They took out a Blackberry bundle and then started using i Phones. The responsibility is all the OP's in my opinion.

Techhead_2

NFH wrote: »

Retail rates for data around the world (for local customers) are typically around £0.01/MB; wholesale rates are lower. Therefore when Orange is paying a foreign network somewhere in the region of £0.01/MB, it is unreasonable to charge £8/MB. It's not a markup but a total rip-off, designed purely to fleece customers like the OP. Unlike other people who come into this forum complaining about data roaming charges (mostly concerning Orange), the OP did take some prior steps to prevent such a large bill.

Not sure on your figures there, for example a recent BBC investigation revealed that US networks charge about $1 a megabyte to the networks of people data roaming. Although that still some way from £8 a megabyte.

But the difficulty for the OP here, is that they purchased a Blackberry data bundle and then used an i Phone. Secondly when they were warned of the mounting charges they continued to use it.

I think the problem has arisen because the OP wasn't familiar with their tariff and how their handsets use data. Whether they should be, and whether that has any affect on the data charges I don't know. (I suspect it will come down to a judgement as to whether a reasonable person would assume that a bundle taken out for a Blackberry would also work with a handset using the providers own data)

Buzby

Afraid the issue of what Orange may pay on their home turf is on little relevance. If you agree to the prices to be charged, you use the service offered. If you don't, you do not. If a NZ firm only charges t equivalent of 20p for a bottle of beer, but bu the time the bill arrives in the UK is is £2 for the same bottle you believe you only should pay 20p?

It appears the data used was all roamed and the fee for this was charged. If, as expected, the OP bought a data bundle in the expectation of cover abroad, that is unfortunate but not a mitigating factor.

NFH

Buzby wrote: »

If a NZ firm only charges t equivalent of 20p for a bottle of beer, but bu the time the bill arrives in the UK is is £2 for the same bottle you believe you only should pay 20p?

You have summarised the problem with roaming prices. A small markup is reasonable, but 900% or 80,000% is not reasonable.

Competition with reasonable markups existed for roaming until around 2001. Every foreign network charged different prices for visiting roaming customers, and your home network would charge you the foreign networks' prices plus its own markup (typically 35%). You would often find that in a particular country, as well as very different prices for calls, one network would have per-second billing for example, another wouldn't charge for outgoing SMS, or another would charge very little for calls to its own customers. I remember when I lived in Germany with an Orange UK phone (before the days of PAYG in Germany), setting the order of preferred networks in my phone was important so that my phone would log on to the more optimal networks in preference to the others. The charges for incoming calls were always set by one's home network though because incoming calls pass through the home network, and Orange's incoming charges were a fraction of the other UK networks' charges. Some charges by foreign networks were very reasonable; for example Orange UK customers were charged 6p/min for outgoing local calls on the cheapest visited network in Singapore, but this suddenly jumped to a fixed £1.30p/min when Orange introduced "simplified" prices on 01/02/2001; it was a similar story with other networks. This anti-competitive behaviour should have been stopped at the outset instead of allowing it to mushroom into the excessively high roaming charges that consumers suffer now for both voice calls and data.

Charges should be reasonable and not designed only to fleece the ignorant. For example, it is unreasonable that Orange charges 800 times its normal rate when a customer uses data outside the UK. Devices are agnostic to location with regard to their data consumption; the charges should be too.

fairman

grumbler wrote: »

Well, 32Mb looks very low even for a BB, but you cannot compare iPhone to BB in terms of the data consumption. It's like comparing a bus to a car. And it's not just iPhone. It's loads of Facebook and Youtube that you obviously didn't use much with your BBs and 32Mb/month. I don't see how you can blame the network.
I just like this 'only'. 21 days is a lot for data roaming.
I agree.
Very generous of them.
Not bad. Hope you lived separately from your relatives.
You owe what you spent, at least after the most generous bundle is applied. It's pretty clear.

We bought INTERNATIONAL DATA bundles, the question we asked was how much we would need, reply-based on your prev usage, 50mb would be plenty, considering we were using 32mb average per month, and (the part you love)ONLY going to be away for 75% of that time, i.e. 21days.

We had to phone them about 5 times to sort out the change of contract from BBs as didn't require the specific BB bundle anymore, and had to get them to change us to iPhone contracts.

1. from these numerous prev customer services communications to change the contract,they should ALREADY know we have iPhones.

2. if the comparison is like a bus to a car, wouldn't that be the first thing he would look at when recommending how much data we would need, Sir, are you driving a bus or a car??? Very obvious to someone who does this for a job. Should the average person know that 2 smartphones could differ so much in this one specific point, when everything else is more or less the same, i.e. texts, calls AND contracts cost the same give or take.