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Student landed with £8,000 Orange mobile broadband bill

The case of William Harrison has provided a stark warning for naive consumers of the risks in using mobile broadband abroad.

Harrison is a 22 year old university student, who was doing an internship in Paris when he was hit with a bill of eight thousand pounds from the ISP Orange.

Harrison racked up the bill through Skype phone calls not realizing that Orange charge £2.94 per megabyte for using mobile broadband overseas. Harrison purchased his mobile broadband dongle at an Orange store in Paris where he was told there would be a 3GB limit on data usage and this would be perfectly sufficient for what he required.

In the UK there is a £40 per month limit on dongle usage to prevent this kind of “bill shock” but at the moment this is not the case overseas.  Something many people including Harrison, are not aware of.

Apparently not all of the Orange staff are aware of it either, given that when the Harrison family queried the bill the telephone operator was ignorant of the fact that the £40 did not apply overseas.

The European Union are bringing in a new bill monitoring scheme to try and prevent these vast charges being accumulated by unsuspecting tourists on the continent, but this will not come into place until 1st March 2010.

However the effectiveness of this new law will be minimal at first as it only regulates the charges ISPs like Orange can make to a maximum of €1 per megabyte, which is not significantly less than Orange’s current £2.94 per megabyte charge.

The new regime will prove far more successful once the limit for data downloading, set at €50, comes into place from July onwards. 

As for Harrison’s case, Orange has offered to halve the bill and allow him to repay it in instalments over 24 months.

Although the charges of usage abroad are mentioned in the terms and conditions, it seems a little unjust that he should be laden with such a large bill given that the Orange staff themselves were unaware of the costs for using it outside the UK.