Nottingham University student William Harrison had quite a shock when he received a bill for £7,648.77  from Orange for using  mobile internet broadband for one month in Paris.

He and his father enquired about using a dongle to access the internet abroad at an Orange store in Hertfordshire. They were told that the dongle would work perfectly on a short term contract in France and that a 3 GB ( gigabyte) limit on data would be fine.

In France William used the internet to access Skype, which is free in the UK, on a daily basis. He had no idea how expensive it was until his first bill for £6,101.56 arrived. He did not download anything which could be considered heavy duty such as videos. He immediately questioned the bill and asked for the dongle to be blocked. There was a further charge to cover the cost of the dongle use for the period between the bill being sent and dongle being blocked resulting in a final bill of £7,648.77.

His shocked father contacted Orange on his behalf to be told that there should be a £40.00 monthly limit on dongle usage. However even  Orange’s own operator did not realise that this does not apply to overseas usage.

William sent Orange a cheque for £158.66 which was the amount that he estimated was  reasonable,although Orange did not acknowledge this.

However Orange have offered to halve the bill  and extend the repayment period to 24 months. Orange have accepted that William and his father had not been told about any relevant data charges and said that steps would be taken to ensure that this does not happen again. They also confirmed that roaming charges are available on their website and literature is provided when the dongle is purchased which advises that these are seperate to the inclusive UK  data allowances. Dongles are not activated for roaming unless specifically requested by the customer.

EU rules are to be introduced on March 1st. to protect users from’ bill shock’. The ruling will also state that a ‘cut off’ must be introduced to prevent downloading data which is beyond an agreed limit.