Posted: 22nd Feb, 2010 By: MarkJ

A 22-year-old university student, William Harrison, has been left stung after mobile operator Orange UK billed him £8000 for using his Mobile Broadband connection outside of the country. This is despite last year’s introduction of new European laws designed to prevent "
bill shocks" (
here).
Last year operators were given until March 2010 to put a new cut-off limit in place, which some promptly introduced. The new rule, one of several in fact, was designed to protect consumers from "
bill shocks" by introducing a cut-off mechanism once the bill reached 50 Euros (£44) (users can also specify a different cut-off limit).
However, according to the
Guardian, Orange's customer service agent apparently told Harrison that the modem would work fine in France. However the agent failed to inform him that its 3GB usage allowance would not apply outside of the UK. Bizarrely Orange initially claimed that it would have infringed the company's customer privacy policy to monitor Harrison's usage.
Orange UK Statement
"We have a number of initiatives in place to help customers control their costs and we hope that these, as well as the customer's own individual responsibility, will ensure customers can manage their roaming costs appropriately. All our roaming charges are available on our website, and literature which advises that these are separate to the inclusive UK data allowance accompanies the dongle at the point of purchase.
Our customer service and retail staff are also trained to advise on the associated costs when travelling abroad, and our dongles are not activated for roaming unless specifically requested by the customer. In addition, our dongles feature a usage tracker alert option which allows users to manage how much data they are using."
It's understood that the customer has since had his bill cut in half. Luckily March is now only one week away and this should serve as a vivid reminder of how roaming Mobile Broadband usage outside of the UK remains prohibitively expensive.