MSE News: £100 cap announced for mobile phone theft victims

grumbler

Who is this guy shouting at? Is it his provider's fault that his phone was stolen? MSE really needs to increase their stock of the images.

On a serious note, the news should have stressed that regardless of the cap a stolen phone has to be reported ASAP as many people fail to understand this simple requirement.

im-lost

boatman wrote: »

It doesn't cost the mobile networks anything, its not a physical product like fuel.. £100 for nothing is money for old rope..

maybe you'd like to set up a nationwide mobile service, and offer it to all MSE users for free :beer::beer:

im sure supplying it all wont cost you a penny :j

grumbler

He will also have to find other companies that will provide roaming in other countries for free and to come to agreement with all premium numbers providers to waive all charges if asked.

macman

boatman wrote: »

It doesn't cost the mobile networks anything, its not a physical product like fuel.. £100 for nothing is money for old rope..

So you think that the overheads of running a mobile phone company are precisely zero? Hilarious.
Most of these huge bills after theft are from unlocked phones stolen abroad, when the bills will be run up on the roaming network and only then passed back to the UK provider.

Jon_01

Pin codes are all well and good (very good in my personally opinion), but you have to factor in the 'room temperature IQ crowd'.
When I worked on the phones for one of the network I'd get (at least once a week, often more) someone calling in who had set a pin on their sim yesterday and today (less than 18 hours later) had no idea what it was!

If a sim is sent out with a pin already set, I can many, many people calling CS to complain that the sim doesn't work because they can't be bothered to read the info that would come with it (or in some cases, just can't read).

grumbler

macman wrote: »

So you think that the overheads of running a mobile phone company are precisely zero? Hilarious.

The point was that the fixed costs don't increase as a result of the fraudulent calls. Only variable costs do that for normal calls constitute a very small proportion of the list price.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variable_cost

Most of these huge bills after theft are from unlocked phones stolen abroad, when the bills will be run up on the roaming network and only then passed back to the UK provider.

Again, the true cost price of roaming calls is very small compared to the list price. The prices of big bundles show this very clearly.

boatman

im-lost wrote: »

maybe you'd like to set up a nationwide mobile service, and offer it to all MSE users for free :beer::beer:

im sure supplying it all wont cost you a penny :j

I'd love to, with the customer service most of them offer, it should be free, its normally their incompetence that people have to call about. Communication companies can't communicate.
As Grumbler has said, its the variable costs. People need to care for their phones to avoid it getting stolen, but I'm sure there are certain circumstances when charging them £100 is perhaps very unfair and beyond their control. In those circumstances £100 for calls that have no real cost is unfair.