Orange data charges & being fleeced

[Guest virtual alan]

Not posted here for ages.....sorry

SPVM3100

Use web occasionally...mainly orange wap pages so not huge useage

Went to France recently....looked at a few pages, mostly wap but a look at the bbc for the Open Golf results on the Sunday

Returned to find bill of nearly 10mb & £130 bill

They have told me it was one page that downloaded all this, but it is now nearly 3 weeks and still no reply from them

Billing integrity team have it.........the robot replied

How is it possible for one page to load so much info? surely the handset only downloads 1 page at a time and I hava to load next/previous or even click any link on a site

Someone here must have a landline number for them in the Newcastle area as I have now made it my mission to try and speak directly to the billing integrity department just to be damn awkward.........even if I fib a little to get through to them

Any assistance is appreciated

[Guest Dr Who]

If you looked at the full BBC page and not the mobile version it loads several hundreds of kb per page refresh. If you then left it on the live results page it will refresh every two minutes until you terminate the GPRS connection. Not sure if that did happen but it is a possible explanation?

[Guest Swampie]

I was on T-Mobile's original Web'n'Walk service (40MB per month) with a friends + relatives discount, so I paid around £16 per month. Rarely got a bill for more than £16.

Then one month I got a very large bill (for me anyway!) around £65 - £70 I think. When I checked my bill, I saw I'd used 80MB of data, so 40MB above my allowance. Looking online at my usage, I could see that most of that 80MB was in < 24 hours. At one point in that month I'd found my device (MDA Vario) had run down over night. It had a full battery the night before, and a completely flat one the next morning. I did remember that the device had felt warm before going to bed too.

The only explanation I could come up with was that it was left on a page which refreshed itself and it gobbled up all that data.

In my case, after speaking to T-Mobile they agreed to refund half the data costs and suggested I move to their new web'n'walk service which has unlimited data. Cost me < £1 per month extra but now I don't need to worry about a browser using up too much data.

[Guest frottage]

Not posted here for ages.....sorry

SPVM3100

Use web occasionally...mainly orange wap pages so not huge useage

Went to France recently....looked at a few pages, mostly wap but a look at the bbc for the Open Golf results on the Sunday

Returned to find bill of nearly 10mb & £130 bill

They have told me it was one page that downloaded all this, but it is now nearly 3 weeks and still no reply from them

Billing integrity team have it.........the robot replied

How is it possible for one page to load so much info? surely the handset only downloads 1 page at a time and I hava to load next/previous or even click any link on a site

Someone here must have a landline number for them in the Newcastle area as I have now made it my mission to try and speak directly to the billing integrity department just to be damn awkward.........even if I fib a little to get through to them

Any assistance is appreciated

Orange data charges are an absolute rip-off perhaps the faster people move away from them in droves the more likely they are to come in line with web n walk. Which will benefit me as Orange is the only reliable signal in my rural community.

[Guest virtual alan]

If you looked at the full BBC page and not the mobile version it loads several hundreds of kb per page refresh. If you then left it on the live results page it will refresh every two minutes until you terminate the GPRS connection. Not sure if that did happen but it is a possible explanation?

That could be the case then

Oh well never mind

Dumped ORANGE and gone to 3 for some slingbox fun ;)