£4,900 mobile broadband bill for iPlayer downloads

Following a news story back in March in which a couple were charged a £11,050 bill for downloading episodes of Friends whilst in Germany, there are reports of yet another mobile broadband horror story. A solicitor, solely going by the name of 'Janet' returned home to a bill for £4,900 from her mobile phone company after downloading The Apprentice, This Week and The Andrew Marr show to her laptop using the BBC iPlayer whilst on a weekend break in Villefranche on the French Riviera. The 46-year-old downloaded the three BBC programs to her laptop using a Vodafone 3G card after assuming that her tariff included downloading whilst abroad. However, like the majority of UK-based only services the downloads were set at a rate of £4.25 per megabyte. As an example, The Apprentice tallies up to around 600MB for one episode.

Telling her story to The Telegraph, Janet said: "I am refusing to pay it because when I got my phone, and when I got my 3G card, I wasn't given any information which said it was going to cost me that sort of money to download data abroad. "The ironic thing is that the hotel where I was staying had Wi-Fi access which I could have used for 15 Euros a day, but I thought I was saving myself 15 Euros by using my 3G card." A spokesman from Ofcom reinstated the watchdog's opinion on high roaming charges: "We think the industry should reduce its roaming charges and if it doesn't then we will discuss with the EC how to reduce the charges." Meanwhile, Viviane Reding, the European Union commissioner for information, society and media, has set a deadline of 1st July for phone companies to cut their fees for downloading data and texting whilst abroad: "Sending a text message or downloading data in another country should not be substantially more expensive that at home...Higher retail charges abroad must be justified or they will have to disappear." Source: Telegraph.co.uk

 

 

 

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