A university student who went to Paris to study has been left with a mobile broadband bill of almost £8,000!
William Harrison, aged 22, went into an Orange store and asked the assistant about mobile broadband and using it in France. He was advised by the staff in the Orange store that mobile broadband would be fine to use in France and recommended him a short term contract that offered him 3Gb usage and told him that this would be “perfectly ample” for what he needed it for. His usage was often to use Skype for phone calls and he didn’t download or watch videos or other applications that used allot of data.
William regularly used Skye back home to make free phone calls over the Internet and thought that he would be able to save money by doing so when in France.
What William was unaware of was that the data transfer was not able to be used outside of the UK and that Orange were charging him £2.94 per Mb for using the dongle abroad.
After his first month of using the mobile broadband dongle abroad last September he received his first bill for a whopping £6,101.56. Upon receiving this he straight away queried the bill and got the mobile broadband dongle blocked so he could not rack up any more charges, however in the meantime between receiving his bill and the dongle getting blocked he racked up a further £1,547.21 and took his total bill up to £7,648.77!
When Williams father, Roger phoned up to speak to Orange about this the Orange operator he spoke to was shocked that this bill had got so large as there should be a £40 per month limit. However the operator was seemingly also unaware that this did not apply to usage when abroad.
There is new European laws to be introduced to help stop users getting “Bill Shock” where the bill would cut off when it reaches a limit of 50 Euros (about £44), although users can alter this limit if they wish.
These laws however, although introduced last year didn’t have to be implemented until 1st March this year.
It is understood that the bill has been halved by Orange and payment terms of 24 months have been made available to William to pay back the mobile broadband bill.