can anyone help - my phone has gone mad!

littlerock

I have a Sony Xperia on a modest monthly sim only plan from Orange/EE/bt. I only use it for calls and texts and sending the occasional photo to family members via SMS. I never approach using up any of my plan elements each month.

Yesterday I had to drive from south London to Norfolk to meet my sister. Before leaving I checked that mobile data, wifi, all data services were switched off on my phone. On the way I made a couple of very brief phone calls to report progress and one more on arrival. I made another brief call home this morning but that was all.

While out with my sister around lunchtime we lost contact and she phoned me to meet up. As soon as I answered I was disconnected from the network. I tried rebooting without success Then I got a message from the phone, saying I had exceeded my monthly data limit. It reported I used 45 mb yesterday alone - to exceed my limit of 100mb. My limit is low but not that low and in any case I was driving a good chunk of the day with all the data channels off and had not turned them back on let alone done more than made 2 or 3 brief calls all day. I checked anyway and they were still off. I also checked my apps are still set to NOT auto update and they are.

Next I got a message from the phone saying my text messages had been suspended because I was 16 Messages over my monthly limit of 100. My limit is low but nothing like that low. The phone was also running down its battery super fast. I tried to call Orange on 150 but was unable to do so - I kept getting the message I had been disconnected from the network. I tried several clean reboots but it would not reconnect me.

My sister and I are away from home so dependent on our mobiles and she is running her plan, on an iPhone, pretty low as we approach the end of the month. She would prefer I did not use it to tackle Orange if possible (she is not with the BT group) or we may both end up phone less.We both face long drives home on our own in the dark in a couple of days time and would rather have a functioning phone to do so.

However I cannot contact Orange on my phone as I have been thrown off the network and do not have access to a landline.I am some distance from an Orange phone shop. (I do have £15 credit on my account).

Anyone get any ideas what might be wrong and how to contact orange in this scenario?

[Deleted User]

littlerock wrote: »

However I cannot contact Orange on my phone as I have been thrown off the network and do not have access to a landline.I am some distance from an Orange phone shop. (I do have £15 credit on my account).

Anyone get any ideas what might be wrong and how to contact orange in this scenario?

Telephone box? Borrow a friend's phone?

J_B

littlerock wrote: »

(I do have £15 credit on my account).

Sorry, confused now. All through, you mention 'limits on your account' then conclude by saying you have £15 credit.

Is it PAYG or contract?

Can you clarify please???

littlerock

I have a sim only plan which i took out to replace my previous payg card when I lost my old payg phone, and bought a replacement phone ( using my orange credit, remember those?;) For some reason my existing PAyG credit could not be transferred to the new plan. I assumed it would snap into use if I exceeded my plan at any time but apparently not, it is locked in limbo as a credit on my account.

Anyway I was telling a friend about my phone problem at the weekend and he recognised the symptoms. It seems it had run out of internal memory due to the number of texts I had stored. This is not normally an issue for me but my VM service was down for a week earlier this month and I had to use my phone to send texts inplace of emails so they must have built up

I did not recognise this as being the cause as the error message was misleading and said I had reached my message limit of 100 when my limit is in fact 750. However it seems it meant not the text messages I type in , but the memory storage limit of the phone........why not make it clear?. The error messGe said nothing at all about internal memory being full.

Anyway once I deleted some text messages it went back to normal☺

Katgrit

Ahh right, I remember YEARS ago with old nokia handsets if they got very full they would get very confused and jumble up messages. New incoming texts get randomly pieced together with parts of old historical messages, with no indication. Maybe this is similar to what's happened and so an incoming message has mixed with a very old one about 100 messages which is no longer applicable as your current package is 750.

Mr.Generous

Useful to know. I think my handset deletes old messages after a certain time, and although its cheap it holds several thousand at a guess. It could be in the settings somewhere have a look see if you can enable auto delete when full or something. It will always delete oldest first, and you should back it up now and again so you never loose anything too important.