Mobile Roaming £818 bill from Orange!

chanz4

I buy the countrys p&g chip and put it in my phone so cheap.

grumbler

Wurtzite wrote: »

Outside the EU it might as well be the Wild West, operators charge each other a fortune, an then they pass that cost plus a hefty margin onto the consumer. If you are a business you get to buy competitive roaming voice and data packages (still expensive) but joe public gets truly ripped off regardless of which network they are with.

Don't blame 'Wild West' operators. Our UK operators are experts in robbing us regardless of 'Wild West' real prices.
Orange charge £8/Mb in Australia while offering 96%:eek: discount with 500Mb bundle. This means that 1Mb costs Orange no more than 32p. My educated guess would be 15-20p that means ~4000% Orange's profit margin if you don't buy a bundle.

marmitepotato

Virgin Mobile sent me a text the moment I switched on my phone in South Africa. It told me how much t would cost me to make and receive calls and texts. It also said...
'To avoid any nasty shocks when you return, we will limit your data to £45. We will let you know by text when you hit £35.'


I was very happy with this as I felt Virgin were actually on my side rather than letting me run up a huge bill. I didn't use any data at all as I turned my data off before I got on the plane.
I feel for the OP. £818 is a nasty surprise.

wantmemoney

grumbler wrote:

United Nations? Are you serious?

not quite sure what point you are trying to make...I presume you know who the United Nations are.

grumbler wrote:

The United Nations... is an international organization whose stated aims are facilitating cooperation in international law, international security, economic development, social progress, human rights, and achievement of world peace.

What do roaming prices have to do with this?

I'm not sure but why do you ask

grumbler wrote:

We already have thousands of Brussels bureaucrats. God save us from yet another Brussels on a bigger scale.

and why do you think consumers who roam inside the EU are better protected than when they roam outside the EU.

because of the 'thousands of Brussels bureaucrats' or the voluntary kindness of the Networks?

grumbler

wantmemoney wrote: »

I'm not sure but why do you ask

I ask because I don't understand what UN have to do with roaming. Why not, say, Amnesty International?
As simple as that.

...and why do you think consumers who roam inside the EU are better protected than when they roam outside the EU.

Protection is good, but I don't understand why Brussels was needed for this and why our own government was incapable of doing the same. And while doing one good thing Brussels make ten bad things that kill market economy. Because of their stupid regulations it is cheaper to send a texts to UK from a UK mobile in Europe than from a UK mobile in UK.
This leads us to a new Soviet Union where half of the working population were busy calculating the 'correct' prices on everything that had to be the same in all shops in any part of the huge empire. I think you know how all this had ended up.

As they say, road to hell is paved with good intentions.
As I said, God save us...

Emy1501

oopsadaisydoddle wrote: »

Although I sympathise with OP, i often think some people are quick to blame the advisors they speak to before travelling. NO ONE can know how much you're likely to use whilst abroad. They can advise based on what you tell them but they are never going to know exactly how much info etc is going to be contained in your emails and such.
They can't even go on previous usage because lots of people use wifi. For eg - if I was to ask for a bundle based on my usage they would probably offer a small one because my monthly mobile data usage is low. My WIFI usage though is shocking!!

It sounds like the bill itself is correct based on what you've put on here so they haven't 'overcharged' you.

I do believe that if you get lucky, you might get some of the charges waived.

Good luck with it though!

Don't know about telecoms market but I work in the financial world and it's all about treating customers fairly. Gone are days when you could hide behind a contract and claim that the customer should have known.

You have treat customers like idiots now and in the OP's case it would not been hard to explain to him that 10mb would be less than 30 mins surfing and anything after this every further 30 mins would be £80.

If the above wasn't clearly explained I suspect the courts would take a dim view of the company in question

grumbler

Emy1501 wrote: »

..it would not been hard to explain to him that 10mb would be less than 30 mins surfing ...

How much less? IMO 30 minutes was exactly what was needed for checking emails once a day during a week.

Emy1501

grumbler wrote: »

How much less? IMO 30 minutes was exactly what was needed for checking emails once a day during a week.

If OP advised he was going to open emails once a day then what was offered was fine as long as further costs were explained.

If advised though that it was going to be about 10 mins twice a day then he would have needed about 60mb+

I'm sure the call would have been recorded and it will depend how the call went

grumbler

Emy1501 wrote: »

If OP advised he was going to open emails once a day then what was offered was fine as long as further costs were explained.

If advised though that it was going to be about 10 mins twice a day then he would have needed about 60mb+

I guess in this case the OP would have been happy to get charged £8*(90-60)=£240 extra when coming back.

And the figure 10Mb/30min is far too rough. If you check the links in the thread that I mentioned above you will find various estimations:

1 hour of web browsing 1.5-25MB
Download 100 emails 1-10MB

50Mb
Browsing the internet 2 hours
Emails 50 emails
Emails with attachments (based on 0.5MB per attachment) 6 emails with attachments

• 1 Email - text only: 3 KB - 20 KB
• 1 Email - with photo attachment: 350 KB
• 1 Email - with MS Office attachment: 300 KB

And all this ignores the unpredictable hidden background activity of any smartphone.

NFH

Orange's charge for data outside the EEA is £8000 per gigabyte, compared to around £10 per gigabyte for UK usage. In future, get a local SIM card and pay the same as a local.