It may have become the must-have gadget of the year, but iPhone users are now learning there's a further cost to being an early adopter: the £1,000-plus bill that can land on their doorstep after a short holiday abroad.
O2, the mobile company which has the exclusive rights to offer the Apple iPhone in the UK, this week came under pressure to slash its overseas data roaming charges. It follows complaints from customers, some of whom have racked up bills in excess of £1,000 solely for accessing emails during a week abroad.
Others have complained that the charges imposed by the phone service provider bear no relation to the amount of data they have downloaded. Since the iPhone was introduced in the UK last November, around 200,000 consumers have paid the £269 up-front fee and agreed to pay at least £35 a month to operate their iPhone. For that, they get an unlimited amount of data downloads - emails and web surfing - but only in the UK.
Few users have so far been aware of the eye-watering charges that accrue when they use the phone abroad.
The problem has arisen partly because O2 imposes some of Europe's highest data roaming charges on its mobile customers - at £7.05 per Mb it is almost twice the European Union average. But the real problem is caused by the fact that the iPhone is always on, and looking for new emails every few minutes. Unwary users who log on when they arrive in another country automatically start accruing the enormous charges - whether they make traditional voice calls or not.
Printing executive Alex Chambers, from Warwickshire, was presented with a bill for £44 after accessing just a few emails while on holiday in Italy in January. He regards himself as highly IT-literate, and had turned off the phone's data roaming function, but was still hit with a large bill.
"I know all about data charges and have seen a few £100 bills down the years. But my first O2 roaming bill was of a different order - somewhere between Barclays profit margin and Northern Rock billwise." Other users on the blogosphere have been less polite.
O2 said this week it was "very open and clear with customers that its unlimited data allowances are only available in the UK" and they will incur roaming charges if using mobile data features while abroad.
"From this July, we will be reducing data roaming prices in Europe by more than 40%," said a spokesman. This month the European telecoms commissioner, Viviane Reding, warned that she will impose price cuts if Europe's mobile phone companies do not drop their data roaming charges significantly by the summer.
The data roaming problem is not restricted to the UK. Adam Aronson, an American interactive kiosk designer, got back from a two-week trip to England to find a $5,086 bill - without making a single voice call.
No comments:
Post a Comment