Orange bill for £500 - help

MrsPB

I've received our mobile phone bill for August from Orange and my phone has clocked up an extra £500. I've spoken to Orange about it and after a few days of looking into it they tell me I was "streaming" or something similar for one hour and ten minutes at lunchtime on 10 August. They can't tell me any more details. I don't really understand what streaming is - I only use the phone for calls, texts, reading work e-mails and occasional internet browsing (and very occasionally to listen to music). It's an iphone 4. I definitely haven't watched any live TV and never watched a movie on my phone. What else could it be? I'm worried as I don't know what it's for so
a) have I actually caused this cost and
b) how do stop it happening again?

Please can anyone help with what I should do next?

Thanks

momstheword

Hi

I recently received a bill for nearly £500 from orange and have set a limit on my orange account so that I cannot go over my set amount of MB per month. You should call orange and ask them to do this for you but £500 extra for an hour and ten minutes streaming doesn't seem right at all. Do you stream music or is the music you listen to saved to your phone?

MrsPB

Hi momstheword

Apparently I had 500mb included but I exceeded this. I only listen to music which is already on my iphone.

Kingsd316

Unless you were abroad, which you have not said i dont see how this is possible, if you were in the UK then there is a data cap of £1 per day and with a max of 31 days in a month something doesnt quite add up!

grumbler

MrsPB wrote: »

... I don't really understand what streaming is - I only use the phone for calls, texts, reading work e-mails and occasional internet browsing (and very occasionally to listen to music). ...

Listening music from internet is streaming too. However, as said above, with a daily cap on the cost it's impossible to run up £500 bill.

MrsPB

I wasn't abroad, was definitely in the UK. The only information Orange could give me was the specific time (1.40 pm to 2:50pm) and I used over my bite allowance on the contract and racked up an additional 52,429. According to the lady I spoke to they can provide no further detail as it's private (i.e. between me and my phone). I don't find this very helpful as I have no idea what it's for and would be happy for them to dig and let me know. The lady also said it wasn't a malfunctioning handset as I would have had similar costs on other days.

She also suggested I look back at my browsing history on my phone to see if this sheds any light, and explained how to do it. So I did what she suggested but it only shows back to last Sunday, which is no help.

What's the £1 per day cap?

I feel so stupid as I don't understand what I've done to rack up the costs. And not looking forward to telling my husband!

Have just looked at my itunes account and I bought an album that day - surely that wouldn't have cost so much with Orange? If so, why doesn't it stop when you hit the free limit, and perhaps ask if you want to carry on? And why would an album be so expensive to download?

grumbler

MrsPB wrote: »

What's the £1 per day cap?

pay monthly out of plan costs

BuntyB

I didn't know I could set a cap at my usage limit. Thanks for that, I will pop into my local orange shop and arrange that

grumbler

BuntyB wrote: »

I didn't know I could set a cap at my usage limit. Thanks for that, I will pop into my local orange shop and arrange that

Don't bother. You can't.

sillygoose

This kind of thing happens all too often for my liking and I find it pretty scary, any smartphone can be unpredictable at times. I know Giff Gaff are pretty crap network in many respects but at least on the unlimited data packs you can't run up a bill like this. Worse case they pull the plug on you but at least that doesn't cost.

NFH

How many megabytes are Orange billing you for and how many megabytes did your phone record that you'd used on the day in question? Without this information, you're going to find it hard to dispute the bill.

My data usage is usually around 200MB to 400MB per month, but one month my Orange bill showed that I had used 916MB when my iPhone had recorded that I had used only 404.5MB (370MB downloaded and 34.5MB uploaded). Orange's customer service system showed that I had downloaded large quantities of data during short daytime periods on two days in the billing month, which if true would have severely drained my battery, but it hadn't done so because I didn't use the data. Also there's no way that my iPhone could have physically downloaded the alleged high quantity of data in the short periods stated. I was just within the 1GB fair usage allowance and was not roaming at the time so there was fortunately no cost or other implication. Nevertheless I asked Orange to investigate several times and made sure that copious notes were made on my account in case the same thing should happen in future more excessively or when I'm roaming, but they failed to investigate. Unfortunately many other customers end up significantly out of pocket when the same thing happens; I was one of the lucky ones. Other people including you come on this forum complaining of a bill for freak usage on one day. I'm sure Orange know all about these data billing errors but won't admit it.