The Daily Mail today recounts the story of Will Pierce who took his young son skiing for 5 days and came home with a £22k bill from Vodafone.
He used his Vodafone dongle to download a relatively small amount of TV programming at a cost which amounted to approximately £300 per minute of TV programming downloaded – so an 18 minute TV show cost him over £5,000! Clearly the same amount of downloading within the UK should effectively be free.
As Mr Pierce rightly points out: ‘There’s no warning when you log on how much it will cost a minute or a counter on the screen telling you what it is costing. If you ran up such a bill on your credit card while overseas you’d get a call checking that it is you who is spending so much.’
This is an absurd situation – people recognise that if they use their mobile phone abroad it costs more, but not hundreds of times more. So as mobile broadband subscriptions become ever more popular, many more mobile broadband users will fall into the same trap as Mr Pierce.
Ofcom, confirmed that there are currently no rules forcing companies to alert their customers to the size of bills they are incurring. An Ofcom spokesman said: ‘We are meeting mobile operators to explore how we can prevent “bill shock” happening. But we don’t act on the charges. The European Commission does.’
However, last week, the European Parliament voted to cap the price of ‘data roaming’ to 0.5 euros a megabyte, but this could take months to become law.
Vodafone initially insisted that Mr Pierce’s usage was ‘valid’ and refused to back down. However, a spokesman for Vodafone said yesterday that the company would waive the full amount. She added: ‘Such bills are exceptionally rare and we have an investigation under way.’