Today I got a nice text message from Vodafone (see inset). As followers will know, I was in hospital for a week this month. As such, my mobile data usage would have been a lot higher than usual. When I signed up for Vodafone 5 years ago, Mobile Data was ‘unlimited’ – apparently that is no longer the case – they never actually gave me notice of my contract randomly changing… common with mobile phone companies, so we’ll ignore that point.
However, I go over this new ‘limit’ for the first time ever. I think – alright, I’ll give them a call and explain the situation and I’m sure it’ll all be fine.
I call up.
Sit in the queue for 10 minutes (I don’t mind that to be fair).
The person I get through to is confused. I have three phones on my contract with Vodafone and she can’t even work out what device I’m on about after giving the number over… twice.
Once she works out what device I’m on about, I’m put on hold…
Apparently the message I got is a warning and I have nothing to worry about. If I go over next month I’ll be charged 50p per 25MB over the 500MB data limit that was never in my contract in the first place.
That’s not really fair now, is it? If it wasn’t for the SureSignal (I live in a metal lined building and thus get zero reception inside), I would be seriously considering leaving Vodafone and pulling all my devices with me.
It’s not the random contract change. I understand that mobile data costs a lot of money and that’s just fine – I’ve never gone over 100-200MB, even on my iPhones – so to be honest that isn’t a problem. It’s not even the fact that I’ll be charged if I go over next month. It’s the fact that the text message doesn’t cover that at all!
The call ended with me being told I can check my usage online… Err, don’t know what planet she lives on, but the Vodafone eBilling site gives no summary of Internet usage and mixes in the itemisation with text messages. As such, I have no idea how much data I have used – at all.
All in all, bit of a poor experience.
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