Charge for going over allowance

joe40

How does three get away with this. I have 60 Gb a month limit on a wireless broadband package, and I pay 39.99 euro per month.

This month due to a mistake by my 10 year old son with an X-box game, over 20 gb was downloaded on the last day of the month which pushed me over the limit.

So now I have a bill for 117 euro.

I have contacted three to explain what happened but they didn't want to know, the data was used so tough you have to pay.

My main gripe is when I asked that I not be given an out of data allowance, so that my connection is stopped when I reach 60 Gb apparently this not possible.

Am I missing something?

They can allow we to go a few Mb over the limit, before stopping the connection and then charge me an extra 75 euro, but they can't stop the connection when I reach 60 Gb so that I do not incur the extra charge.

Surely this is profiteering on peoples mistakes/mishaps such as in my case.

I would love to hear a plausible explanation for this way of doing business. I understand the data limit but just stop the connection when limit is reached!!

Bob24

Out of allowance charges have been cash cows for mobile companies for years. Crazy high out of allowance charges and a mechanism which doesn't stop you but only warns you once you have spend a few hundred euros is what all of them have been doing.

Back in 2008 I had that with my original iPhone on Meteor and my crazy 250MB allowance. On month I went over the allowance 10 or 20 MBs (whohoo) and by the time Meteor notified me it was 200 euros. I actually managed to get them to cut the charge to 50 euros after spending some time with them on the phone. It is purely depending on their goodwill as that money is pure profit for them and there was virtually no additional cost to them to provide the service they charged 200 euros for. It will depend on which company you are talking to, what are their policies about it, and who is the mood of the CSR.

Only thing you can do is be careful as this is legal - but it is a bit of a dodgy business practise indeed (one day or another, everyone will forget to monitor their usage or not realise one particular application is unusually hitting their allowance). Refusing to block the service once the allowance is reached clearly shows it is a marketing technique.

ED E

joe40 wrote: »

How does three get away with this. I have 60 Gb a month limit on a wireless broadband midband package, and I pay 39.99 euro per month.

Its not broadband, its midband. If you have kids its totally unsuitable. Get a fixed line connection.

Bob24

ED E wrote: »

Its not broadband, its midband. If you have kids its totally unsuitable. Get a fixed line connection.

Agreed it is not a very suitable solution for the OP, but to be fair broadband is how Three are calling these offers.

joe40

ED E wrote: »

Its not broadband, its midband. If you have kids its totally unsuitable. Get a fixed line connection.

If only I could.

when checked with eir website the phone line is not suitable but they are sending out an engineer to make sure. The first chance I get I'm going with wired broadband.

In the last month x-box and new sky box are in the house. 2 new devices along with phones and tablets. The wireless broadband (that what three call it) is not suitable but they charge plenty and profiteer on mishaps

Zillah

I'm not sure how your specific modem works but you should be able to set up your own hard cap on how much data can be used.

ED E

The operators use the term as average joe cant distinguish between "wifi" and "de internet". Unfortunately this leaves you the consumer to do your homework properly.


The XBox will decimate your limit when new games are purchased (sometimes theres more game in the patches downloaded than on the disk). The Skybox will decimate you day to day with one season of a show being anywhere from 10-30GB.

If the eir line is inviable then you're better off with an FWA provider with a daily limit vs a monthly one if possible where it just goes slow after x GB. Check IrelandOfflines map for that.

Scruff

Meteor and now vodafone have introduced cut offs at the cap limit on their mobile "broadband" packages so it blatant profiteering by three.
Aside from complaining (and do so here too ) you could also do the following:

1) Get a three prepay phone sim and top up by €20 to get the all you can eat data (15gb fair use clause never enforced so far).
2) Put it in your router/mifi/dongle and use that instead of your 60gb sim
3) If out of contract cancel 60GB package. If not swallow the €20/month price increase in the knowledge that your bill is now fixed and no more nasty surprises

Jayop

Scruff wrote: »

Meteor and now vodafone have introduced cut offs at the cap limit on their mobile "broadband" packages so it blatant profiteering by three.
Aside from complaining (and do so here too ) you could also do the following:

1) Get a three prepay phone sim and top up by €20 to get the all you can eat data (15gb fair use clause never enforced so far).
2) Put it in your router/mifi/dongle and use that instead of your 60gb sim
3) If out of contract cancel 60GB package. If not swallow the €20/month price increase in the knowledge that your bill is now fixed and no more nasty surprises

I know someone else who used to do this and it worked well. Just topped up the card from their mobile banking app iirc.

These limits are nuts anyway. I use around 400gb per month and I download nothing. That's all streaming and gaming.

joe40

Thanks to everyone who reponded, I knew about the prepay 3g sim but was always reluctant to this. I do actually like to folow the rules but his kind of behaviour from a large company just makes me more cynical.

I genuinely thought there may have been some tech reason why these charges apply but it would appear not to be the case.

this is from Three when I e-mailed them

Dear Joseph,

Thank you for your email.

I've checked your account and can confirm that you exceeded the 60GB allowance allocated to your broadband account and got charged €76.21 extra (including VAT). You were charged the out of bundle rate (OOB) of 5.08c per MB for going over the allowance.

The charges are genuine and valdi and hence we're unable to amend the bill.

We agree that the out of bundle charges are expensive, you can also check our price guide for this information and hence we always advise are customers to keep a check of their usage on My3; the link is - http://www.three.ie/pdf/current-priceguide.pdf.

A credit limit is assigned to all bill pay accounts by Three as a way to establish a credit relationship with our customer. It is assigned to every account which allows the customer to go out of bundle even after the allowances are exhausted. The current credit limit on the account is €45 and this was changed 2-3 days ago for you and cannot be reduced further.



So the credit limit is assigned to establish a "credit relationship" whether you want it or not. How crazy is that!!

Jayop

Dude you're not breaking any rules by putting a pre-paid sim into the dongle. In my opinion it's a hell of a lot less dishonest than the business practices that you've just been faced with.

Bob24

Jayop wrote: »

Dude you're not breaking any rules by putting a pre-paid sim into the dongle. In my opinion it's a hell of a lot less dishonest than the business practices that you've just been faced with.

Well technically the T&Cs for that offer say "The data service is available for use with your Three SIM Card in your Three handset only. Tethering or use of the Three handset as, or the sim in conjunction with, a modem is not allowed and may be disabled."

But yeah I wouldn't feel too sorry for Three if people are doing that ...