Orange Halves Student’s Large Phone Bill
William Harrison of Nottingham University has accumulated a bill close to the amount of £8000 in his phone bill from Orange Mobile.
Harrison was placed in Paris for the duration of six months. In an effort to avoid the costly long distance telephone calls, the student opted to use Skype. However, the costs of his internet connection through Orange Mobile proved to be even more costly than expected.
It was reported that an Orange shop assistant had assured Harrison that the monthly 3G data allowance that comes with the SIM will be sufficient for handling his internet needs. Understanding the situation, Orange has decided to halve the total cost of the bill and allow Harrison two years to pay.
This little incident is reminiscent of a complaint last year of individuals who subscribed to unlimited 3G SIMs under the misguided notion that there would be no data transfer limits. Since mobile networks charge according to data access and not usage time, many believed that the unlimited usage access meant that the amount of data transferred was also unlimited. Needless to say, both individuals run up a pretty hefty charge on their accounts.
Orange has since implemented various means in order to control the bandwidth usage and to make subscribers aware of the fact that their data transfer rates are limited to only a few GB each month. Roaming charges are pretty costly with the cost of £3 for every 1MB of data.
Nowadays, the staff of Orange Mobile are trained to fully orient customers on the charge rates and the limitations of using their accounts when roaming. Of course, this still means that we should all be responsible for own data consumption rates as well.
Read more about this news story and more at Mobile Today UK.
