Data roaming cap exceeded Talk mobile

Bailes550

I was wondering if anyone else has come across this issue.

Just come back from Turkey, 1st day arrived turned my phone on, and forgot to turn data off, text recieved saying £44 limit has been hit and you will be charged, fair enough my fault.

But on coming home, ive checked my bill and i owe £113 of data charges, on calling them, they said they couldnt put the cap in fast enough, as alot of date was consumed within a 20 minute spell and ive got to pay it and theres nothing they can do. Im thinking isnt the cap rubbish if thats the case :S

Now i dunno if this is just BS their spouting, but has anyone else had something similar to this. Not to even recieve a text or any notification to tell me this was the case, i find a bit harsh to say the least. Looking over the forums, it sound like i got off lightly with some of the bills being wracked up.

SuperHan

This does happen often as there tends to be a delay between data being used abroad and your home network knowing about, so sometimes when they see you have hit the £44 marker, you have already gone way above it. As far as I'm aware, this is true for all networks.

Legally, there may be something about this in the T&Cs and I know some networks will waive the charges as a goodwill gesture, but I don't really know if they have to/will do.

NFH

At the very least you could challenge Talkmobile on why their data roaming charge in Turkey is so unreasonably high at a whopping £7500 per gigabyte. The high charge is disproportionate to the negligible wholesale rate that they are charged by the Turkish networks.

Talkmobile also charges this unreasonable price in several EEA countries, which is illegal. However, Turkey is not in the EEA, so you can't use this argument.

MillicentBystander

Look on the bright side - you could have been on Orange instead

Bailes550

haha yer deffiantly looking the bright side after seeing that and many other stories through searching the forums

Thank you for replies all, I'll defiantly be challenging them to see what they say on your point NFH. I'll let you know if i get any outcome, i think i better keep my expectations low but you never know.

grumbler

Bailes550 wrote: »

... text recieved saying £44 limit has been hit and you will be charged, fair enough my fault....

What limit? I can't find anything about this on their website.

NFH

MillicentBystander wrote: »

Look on the bright side - you could have been on Orange instead

Yes, Talkmobile charge "only" £7500/GB compared to Orange's £8000/GB. However, the advantage of being on Orange is that they have many data roaming bundles which customers can ask to be applied retrospectively in cases of bill shock.

MillicentBystander

NFH wrote: »

Yes, Talkmobile charge "only" £7500/GB compared to Orange's £8000/GB. However, the advantage of being on Orange is that they have many data roaming bundles which customers can ask to be applied retrospectively in cases of bill shock.

'can ask to be applied' being the applicable wording. Absolutely no guarantee this will happen and the fact they don't have any sort of cap/method of warning their customers about the massive costs they are (unwittingly) incurring tells me all I need to know about Orange as a company. In the OPs case, if they had been on Orange the bill shock would have been considerably higher than with Talkmobile.

PS Both company's per GB charge is ridiculous, btw. But one does seem more keen to limit the bill shock to its customers.

NFH

Perhaps you could tell Talkmobile that you misread their "£7.50 per megabyte" as "7.50p per megabyte", the latter being a more realistic charge that a consumer would reasonably expect to pay.

While you're at it, you may like to ask Talkmobile why they charge the same £7500/GB (£7.50/MB) in parts of the European Economic Area where Regulation (EU) No 531/2012 caps data charges at 58p/MB, for example Norway, Liechtenstein, Iceland, Gibraltar and French overseas departments (French Guiana, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Reunion). They are charging 13 times the maximum allowed by law. Although this is not specifically relevant to your problem, it is nevetheless indicative of Talkmobile's greed and general policy of fleecing its customers, even when disallowed by law.

Bailes550

Well it looks like i had a missed call from them earlier but i did get an email reply, pretty generic to say the least.

"As the data charges occurred on the same day it wasn't possible to add a bar any sooner as the call data we receive from the network is delayed by up to three days.

The data roaming charges for Turkey are £7.50 per megabyte these are set by the network.

All roaming charges are available on our website."

buscape

NFH wrote: »

While you're at it, you may like to ask Talkmobile why they charge ..... £7500/GB (£7.50/MB)

It's worse than that, 1GB is 1024MB so they're charging £7680 and Orange are charging £8192 per gigabyte. Ridiculous.