£163,000 Orange bill

SnowTiger

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-22624823:

An electrician and his wife had a shock when they received a mobile phone bill for £163,000, then fought for months to have the debt cleared.

For 15 years, Alan and Carolyn Mazkouri, from Swansea, had a business deal with Orange for 10 phones.

They told the BBC's Watchdog programme that they normally had a bill for £300 a month, before the shock demand came in September.

Orange has now apologised and promised a refund and a gesture of goodwill.

[...]

The bill suggested that Mr Mazkouri's phone had downloaded data by dialling up the internet every 20 minutes for three weeks.

The data use was the equivalent of downloading more than five million emails or 15,000 songs - and resulted in a bill of £163,178.86.

[...]

This story will feature in the BBC's Watchdog programme on BBC One at 20:00BST on Wednesday, 22 May.

grumbler

Interestingly, every time we hear about abnormal extreme data usage it's Orange again and again...

ZhugeEX

bloody hell. That's only around ~60GB ish

They should really have caps on data with booster packs on all contracts, old and new. Esp if Orange never warned him until the £163,000 bill arrived.

And agreed with Grumbler, it's always Orange.

SnowTiger

grumbler wrote: »

Interestingly, every time we hear about abnormal extreme data usage it's Orange again and again...

The problem seems to have been a faulty handset. I guess it could have been a (rogue) app.

The report mentions it was replaced after the customer complained about it overheating. I'd have thought battery life would have been hammered quite hard too.

I'm surprised the networks (well, Orange) don't monitor these things more closely. It can't be in anyone's interest—including their own—to lumber customers with crippling bills such as this.

What's Orange got out of it? Some bad publicity, they've cancelled the bill and paid out £250 compo.

diamonds

Any right off becomes a tax incentive, Orange will not fix their backhaul or pricing structure as many will pay unfair charges and large amounts in the 1000's written off become a great tax cheat - both equate to better profits for O/EE.

One could argue publicity is good given the outcome customers trust Orange to sort issues out. £250 compensation is a drop on the ocean on the favourable tax implications.

robbies_gal

is that even possible for one phone?

Techhead_2

robbies_gal wrote: »

is that even possible for one phone?

This is a multi-handset business tariff. If they have had the deal for 15 years it's likely to be a legacy tariff , out of bundle data could be £8 a megabyte. It could represent 20Gigabytes, which if a faulty handset is continuously connecting is possible. (The handset was apparently getting hot).

ZhugeEX

Techhead wrote: »

This is a multi-handset business tariff. If they have had the deal for 15 years it's likely to be a legacy tariff , out of bundle data could be £8 a megabyte. It could represent 20Gigabytes, which if a faulty handset is continuously connecting is possible. (The handset was apparently getting hot).

It was around 53GB in the end i think.

im-lost

robbies_gal wrote: »

is that even possible for one phone?

Just to put things in to perspective, my usage below over the last few months, now, I use my phone as my sole Internet connection at the moment, long story, but it works well, speeds are faster than on a landlines service locally, and we'll, as you can see, I use a fair amount considering it's via a mobile connection, but I stream quite a bit on the xbox, download some largish files etc etc

Not t c at I'm saying it's what people do to rack up such large bills, but I can imagine it would be fairly easy to do so, if you didn't understand the charging structure for out of bundle usage..

Take the highest month, it would cost over £10,000 at threes current rates