I saw your article on a £3,000 BT mobile phone bill run up for watching SpongeBob SquarePants. My partner and I have a similar problem after receiving a bill for £2,213.36 for surfing the net and looking at emails – we don’t use it for downloads or watching films or TV.
I had asked BT what would be the best dongle to use as we were moving house – and temporarily into a caravan – while waiting to sign contracts. After just one month the dongle stopped working. BT said the account had been put on hold in mid-August as we were over our limit and had to pay £1,600.
We’ve written to BT and to date have only received an email confirming its cancellation of the account in November and demanding that we settle the bill of £2,213.36. SH, Higham, Kent
We have come across situations when account holders say they have not received texts or (unwisely) chosen to ignore them, but you did receive and respond to them, and contacted BT to buy another 5GB for £52.50. But by this stage you must have already run up a bill of hundreds of pounds. Although the standard BT texts give customers the chance to choose “a more cost-effective option”, they do not state the extra costs they are now incurring.
A BT spokesperson said: “We would like to apologise for the issues surrounding a business mobile broadband data bill during the house move. SH contacted us in August after receiving several text messages alerting her that she had gone over her data usage, and we increased the data bundle to 5GB as requested. When that was used up we tried contacting the customer on their alternate telephone number but were unsuccessful. If a customer goes over their data usage on business mobile broadband they are charged at 10p per megabyte and we are working towards including the price in our alert messages going forward. We are liaising with SH to resolve the issue.” In our view, a resolution should involve slashing this bill almost completely.
What BT has not explained is why individuals are still getting whacked with enormous bills that bear no relation to the cost of providing the service. Because these are business accounts there could be thousands of account holders who don’t check properly and just quietly pay the extra data costs.
We welcome a move towards clearer information for customers on cost, but think the concept of a limit or a cap – which implies a cut-off of service rather than continuation at a higher rate – might be misleading.
BT added: “Our aim at BT Business is to provide a service that meets each individual customer’s needs. We are currently reviewing the range of data services we offer to our varied business customers to ensure that price and plan are appropriate to their needs.”
We welcome letters but cannot answer individually. Email us at consumer.champions@theguardian.com or write to Consumer Champions, Money, The Guardian, 90 York Way, London N1 9GU. Please include a daytime phone number
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