Help! Stepsons mobile bill > £4500

Earthworm

Ultimately the process in place at the moment is hear to stay... At least for the near future. I can see both arguments and, as a user who has no intention of sitting glued to my phone whilst on holiday rubbing my Facebook friends' noses in how good my holiday is, I turn my data off. The charges have been around for a while now and networks do specify the charges clearly upon travel.

The only advice I can give is to tell everyone you know about what can happen, have them tell their friends and so on. Word of mouth is far more powerful than a web page provided by someone who bills you once a month.

My only wish would be that operators automatically bill you the bundle rate for using data abroad (ie. £175 for 500MB) so the bill isn't quite so shocking.

Glad this was all sorted.

PS. Can anyone remember when it was weird to use things like Facebook (MSN Messenger at the time) when in other countries or on Christmas Day?

victor2

Earthworm wrote: »

PS. Can anyone remember when it was weird to use things like Facebook (MSN Messenger at the time) when in other countries or on Christmas Day?

Only too well.
We had a little gathering of friends at our house only a few months back. There was a lull in conversation and another friend observed that 3 attendees were silently glued to their smartphones, ignoring all around them - the rise of anti-social media!
Could just have been a dull party I suppose, but I think not!

Earthworm

Its mental. I ditched Facebook 2 years ago and ha e never looked back... Saved me an arm and a leg in data usage on my mobile too (well, £5 per month for the next tariff up). I'm lucky my friends aren't into smartphones... Sone haven't even used one before.

NFH

Richard_T_ wrote: »

The local sim is a very good option, although that means that you will be unable to receive calls form home unless you know the number,

No, it doesn't. You simply put a voicemail greeting on your UK number telling callers to dial your foreign number. This filters out unnecessary calls and ensures that the caller, and not you, pays the cost if they really need to speak to you.

wantmemoney

wantmemoney wrote:

may be it's time the Networks were told to allow customers (not just parents) to be able to put spend limits on accounts.

yes they now allow it in some other countries in order to protect accounts that are being used by children from being ripped off by unscrupulous networks and dishonest premium rate companies for example.

zenmaster wrote:

Where would it end?

Supermarket cap?
Bar tab cap?
Car dealer cap?

I have no idea what that silly unhelpful nonsense has to do with an account holder wanting measures to protect their account from accidental spend and worse.

Elvisia

What would be useful is if companies like Orange would flag up when you're going into massive debt, rather like credit cards which stop and then ring you to say there is dodgy activity on your account. They must realise no one wants to spend 4.5k on a phone bill, not unless it's a business account which has big bills before. So maybe Orange could send an automated message to say you've reached a £500 limit perhaps.

CNash

It's worth noting that, on iPhone and Android phones at least, you can set an option called "Data roaming" to OFF in your phone's settings, which will automatically disable data connections when the phone detects that you're not on your normal native network. Also note that connecting to a Wi-Fi network or hotspot doesn't use any of your contract's data allowance.

grumbler

CNash wrote: »

It's worth noting that, on iPhone and Android phones at least, you can set an option called "Data roaming" to OFF in your phone's settings,

I think that you can do this on all phones that are capable of using data connection.

NFH

grumbler wrote: »

I think that you can do this on all phones that are capable of using data connection.

I'm not so sure. I know of several smartphones or semi-smartphones where you can't, mostly which are not sold any more, e.g. the HTC HD2 (Windows Mobile 6.5) and the Sony Ericsson W995. Often the only way to disable data roaming is to disable or delete the APN settings, which disables all data, not just when roaming.

Guys_Dad

NFH wrote: »

The main problem is that the networks don't want spending caps because that equates to revenue caps, and the networks obviously want to maximise revenue.

Generalisation. As has already been mentioned, O2 and Vodafone by default do apply a cap of £44 to all data roaming, inside and outside the EEC, unless you opt out.

Nasty capitalists! :rotfl: