MSE News: Holidaymaker sailing Greek islands charged £8,000 after her mobile used...

Ganga

She should have bought a radio and kept her phone for making phone calls.

System

phillw wrote: »

This is the kind of case that would be good to escalate to the European courts.

What are 'the European courts'?

d123

phillw wrote: »

This is the kind of case that would be good to escalate to the European courts.

Why?

Consumer consciously turns off safeguards and then connects to a Turkish network which is known to be eye wateringly expensive as it’s non-EU roaming.

Where does any court come into it?

redux

phillw wrote: »

This is the kind of case that would be good to escalate to the European courts.

The £18.75 per megabyte rate is published on the Utility Warehouse website.

It is very high, the highest I can remember seeing anywhere, but it is duly notified.

pmduk wrote: »

I think it's it's a warning about using your phone for treaming music whilst abroad. it's data-hungry. You're not watching the screen for warning nessages.

Ganga wrote: »

She should have bought a radio and kept her phone for making phone calls.

I'm not sure whether it is about music. If it truly is 445 MB in only 40 minutes, that is significantly faster than most music streaming, which averages of the order of 1 megabyte a minute.

Maybe video, or maybe the connection time was longer than the 40 minutes in the article. I'd be surprised by the latter, seeing as the Ombudsman has looked through the details.

LadyDee

To be fair, she wasn't IN Turkey - she was in the Greek Islands. If she had been IN Turkey then obviously you would expect to be charged the rates for that country.

How many people would dream that they'd be connecting through Turkish broadband when visiting the Greek Islands? I suspect only the really clued up techie people.

Doc_N

A very good point. And one that might well be tackled by the EU at some point to put an end to this sort of blatant profiteering.

Not that that would be any use to the citizens of any country stupid enough to want to leave the EU.

pmduk

LadyDee wrote: »

How many people would dream that they'd be connecting through Turkish broadband when visiting the Greek Islands? I suspect only the really clued up techie people.

Surfing whilst afloat is always a risky business (for roaming), whether it's a yacht or a ferry.

buglawton

Do any UK mobile networks allow proper control of roaming options? For example on Three I'd like to set it to 'data roam in any Three Like Home' country but definitely not in any other.

Roaming uncertainty and inability to control a daily data cap in the UK are the reasons I won't consider anything other than pay as you go. So the networks are missing a trick if they can't offer good solutions for people who think the same way.

pmduk

buglawton wrote: »

Do any UK mobile networks allow proper control of roaming options? For example on Three I'd like to set it to 'data roam in any Three Like Home' country but definitely not in any other.

I don't think phones contain the technology to know which deals any network has at a particular given time. The user knows this and can turn roaming on and off at will and as we know of old will always blame everybody else for their mistakes.

redux

LadyDee wrote: »

To be fair, she wasn't IN Turkey - she was in the Greek Islands. If she had been IN Turkey then obviously you would expect to be charged the rates for that country.

How many people would dream that they'd be connecting through Turkish broadband when visiting the Greek Islands? I suspect only the really clued up techie people.

(I don't want anyone to mistake this for a political comment.)

Anyone who looks at a map of the area for the first time might be surprised that several Greek islands with names they've heard of are geographically much closer to Turkey than the Greek mainland, i.e. less than 10 km from Turkey and about 200 km from Greece.

Also note that at sea, signals might be received a bit further than over irregularly shaped land. I once saw 14 networks from the top of the Dover-Calais ferry, though the phone wouldn't actually connect to the Belgian or Dutch ones. 30 km range isn't unusual though.