Massive charges for putting phone sim in data dongle

cldeaville

Hi All,

I run a small business and have a handful of staff who have works mobile phones and data dongles.
In December we were sent a replacement sim card for one of the phones. This was passed to the relevant staff member however it wasnt made clear that it was for his phone (my fault entirely)
The chap then put it in to his broadband dongle and used it for 3 days uploading and downloading high res photos as part of his job.

We then get the bill and notice the mistake. The bill is over £800 :eek:

You would think there would be some safety mechanism to protect stupid people like me. It could have been a whole lot worse if the timings were different, we could have had a months worth of usage which would have been 1000's !

The network operator can see that we pay for an actual data sim which wasnt used in this time so you would hope they would be able to do something.

Do I have a leg to stand on or should I put it down to a harsh lesson in life ?

Chris

grumbler

cldeaville wrote: »

Do I have a leg to stand on

I don't think so.

The network operator can see that we pay for an actual data sim which wasnt used in this time so you would hope they would be able to do something.

You can ask for a gesture of goodwill, but you are at their mercy.

Hairymonster

You are at their mercy but if you are a good customer and through your business are paying them a lot of money annually they may give you some kind of rebate- let them know the sim that was sent out wasn't identifiable as a phone sim hence the mix up.

If they stick to their guns say you are unhappy with the outcome and will be taking all of your business contracts elsewhere when the contracts are up.

You could even point out how much you have been paying and for how long. The more you paid them in the past/longer you have been a customer the more likely they will be to give you some kind of rebate.

Simple answer is don't ask don't get!!! Good luck

Silk

cldeaville wrote: »

The chap then put it in to his broadband dongle and used it for 3 days uploading and downloading high res photos as part of his job.


Do I have a leg to stand on or should I put it down to a harsh lesson in life ?

Did you tell him it's coming out of his wages :rotfl:

It may be worth asking the network if they could apply a retrospective bundle to the account for the sim ...it seems to have worked for some customers in situations like this

Kernel_Sanders

What sickens me is that when a company makes a simple mistake like this they usually incur no penalty yet when a customer does they can rake in hundreds of pounds at no extra cost to themselves.

martin.cat

What happened to the employees phone sim? Did this continue working whilst the new one as in the dongle? If it had stopped when the new wine was being used the problem would surely have been identified?

When I upgraded phones recently a new nano sim was required and both worked initially then within an hour or so the old one stopped working

If you raise this point with your mobile company maybe they will reduce / remove the charge

sillygoose

My company does a similar thing for staff, recently they simplified things by getting rid of the dongles and data sim's. Instead the phone sim was changed to a tariff that includes all the calls and data we could need and we just tether the laptop to the phone by wifi and use that as a data modem when needed.

I had my reservations but it does work, you can still use the phone at the same time for calls and it can even remain in your pocket out of sight. Data speeds are the same. Simplifies accounting.

You just need to ensure the phone tariff includes enough data and specifically allows for tethering (some don't!). If the staff have fairly modern phones they probably have all the equipment they would need already so it won't cost anything.