Beware - 10GB Orange EE Data Plan

dogsbreath

I bought a 3G iPad and used a mix of wifi and 3G on a 5GB (£15/month) plan. I moved where I worked and lost access to wifi so my 3G usage went up through the 5GB limit. Each month Orange would charge me per MB for the extra - fair enough. After 3 months I decided that I ought to upgrade to the 10GB plan (£25/month) so that I would know what the bill would be each month.

I don't have a landline so all of my surfing, Skypeing, emailing and a lot of the downloading is done over 3G. I have been getting up to about 8GB each month. Yesterday I started to get messages popping up on my iPad telling me that I was exceeding the fair use policy, that my usage was unfair to others. I just got a message from EE on the iPad telling me that despite being warned I had continued to exceed the fair usage policy and I would only be able to access simple web pages. I wandered over to Orange's website to look at my account usage.

Billing date: 5th of the month
Date: 25th of the month
Used: 4.487GB
Remaining: 5.752GB

So I am 20 days into the month (two-thirds) and have used less than half of my allowance that I have paid for in advance. Skype, which I use twice a day, has been affected by the strangling. So are EE/Orange telling me that although I am using less than the amount of data allowance that I am paying for, they don't like the fact that I am getting to about 80% of my limit, and they want to tell me how I should use my data allowance and intend to make using it as difficult as possible.