If only people would challenge such payments... Contract Law can sometimes be useful if charges appear unfair or unreasonable. One of the tests for whether a contract is fair includes whether the contract allowed the company / business to impose undue financial burdens. When people sign up for a service that would typically cost £60/month, maybe £200 or more when abroad, but are hit with £11,000 bill they should seek legal advice. Other examples of unfair contracts are when hidden clauses bind the signatory - was your seemingly unlimited financial liability clearly stated? And when contract terms are not written in clear language.

... Wifi roaming is dirt cheap, or even free, (but when they leave it open deliberately, they're usually a cap on it which makes downloading anything large slowwwww).

But still, who would buy 3G and take the risk of an insane roaming bill?

There's another risk in using 3G too, your PC logs in to networks which you personally don't have a contract with. You assume that you are allowed because it lets your computer connect, but you don't know.

As the police in UK showed, using a network you know you don't have a contract with is a crime under the 1991 'only criminals use computers' act. You can't rely on that login to that network you didn't agree a contract with as proof of the right to login.

Then there's the 3 strikes and you're out risk. Get 3 accusations of downloading and your ISP will cancel your connection....

So just step away from the computer, and definitely don't touch 3G because companies like vodafone spend tens of billions on it and for that to work, they both have to lobby to kill open (free and competing) WiFi, and every so often force people to pay a few thousand quid.

Phone operators should do it like the post offices: Don't charge for international roamers on your network and expect others to do the same. Log the calls and send them back to the contract owner to deal with.

Is it that hard?

Oh, wait, revenue from idiots. I forgot.

How did he install the software to allow the downloading? Whilst I've not used the Channel4 software I had a little play with the Beebs Iplayer last night and couldn't install without using admin rights...in the end I ditched it not liking the P2P and the DRM...

Is it acceptable to use the work laptop to watch tv shows - Interesting question and I wonder what it says in the company's AUP. I guess if you're going travelling then a bit of friends in english might be more fun than the Bundesligia..

Why did she need to download it? It's on E4 all the time....ALL THE TIME!

in this story than the ENTIRE friends saga, I'd imagine!

The word "numpty" springs to mind. Didn't he even notice this happening. (Well, no, apparently)

Question is, did his missus get to watch those episodes eventually?

A salutory lesson in the perils of roaming-data charges (AKA highway robbery)

.......that women should not be allowed to use computers. Any man that allows a lady to do so deserves a hit in the pocket region.

Why should it be more expensive just because you're on another network?

Answer - because business customers are the main users.

It's all marketing nonsense, there's no technological reason for it at all.

And if the user was on a VPN to a home proxy?

When roaming on 2G or 3G, packet switched data often routes back to the home network and then out to the internet. so it can look like you are still in the UK.

This is the sort of thing that infuriates me. Why do people insist on everyone in the family using the same profile?

Surely they get what they deserve for not using their bloody pc properly?

Data roaming charges being obscene is one thing... another is not being able to use a laptop properly - or even appropriately.

Why Paris? Because finding out other people are as stupid makes Paris cry (with relief).

"OI! Put yer knickers on and make me a cup of tea!"

Travelling from Ireland to the UK for a couple of days, I paused my online backup software (Carbonite) in Dublin airport before departure.

First night in the UK, I hit the "standby" button as usual, shut the lid, and went to bed. Some shitty driver stopped the laptop from entering standby, and shortly afterwards Carbonite unpaused itself automatically (nice feature!), did a 450MB online backup overnight, and landed me with a €2k+ Vodafone bill.

I squealed to Vodafone, they credited me back about €1700 or so.

The pricing is absurd. If they charge €50 for the first 100MB, the next 100MB should be less than €50, not ten times that price.

Unfortunately in Ireland, the alternatives are less appealing. 3's Irish network is port/protocol blocked to hell and overloaded due to silly giveaway pricing and undercapacity, and O2 are as bad as Vodafone for roaming charges.

They are all as bad as each other, in different ways. You get the "choice" between shit, expensive, or both. Market forces haven't fixed this, so the regulator needs to step in and stop the gouging.

John

...for using 3G abroad, and only for downloading about 300Mb, god knows how.

Interestingly enough, I got the bill written off by talking to them, basically threatening to leave them, and stating that I hadn't downloaded anywhere near the 1Gb usage limit, and not being aware of what caused the 300Mb to transfer, which is true.

Didn't stop me getting fed some total bullshit about why they couldn't help me, something to do with T-Mobile Netherlands being a totally different company than T-Mobile UK - trying to force me into paying. How wrong they were.

This doesn't stop 3G Roaming being a total and utter rip off and is in need of serious investigation by Ofcom and the EU in general. More so than these token actions from before which didn't seem to achieve anything.

.

Every time I travel, I switch off data transfers on my phone. Natch.

What if your OS decides that NOW is the time to download some massive collection of updates? I've certainly seen a few MS Update Tuesdays that were hundreds of megabytes. What if other software on your PC decides to update itself while you're on the road? There are so many programs installed that it would be difficult to ensure that they're all switched off. And many that you do switch off the auto-update function start to get quite naggy.

One problem is that some 3G operators, and some of their stupid data plans, treat every bit as precious (i.e. expensive). Someone should write a mocking song to the tune of Monty Python's 'Every Sperm is Precious' and replace sperm with bit.

Another problem is that the ability to control such behaviour is at best akward, and at worst almost impossible.

Paying such an insane bill is not an option. It's a case where common sense should over-rule contract law.

The worst thing that could happen would be to place "reasonable" limits on such bills, such as "only" one thousand Euros per month. Because then victims might actually be expected to pay the bills. Better to see stupidly insane bills so that the insanity is more clear to all.

Surely, with that kinda bill, she'd be expected to her knickers off whenever the husband wants, not put them back on?

Choosing fire as symbol here, cause International Roaming needs to be burn in hell.

If you just leave it up to chance your begging for a kick in the arse. I've never had a problem with roaming charges because I simply won't use my 3g card when abroad. Having said that 11K is ridiculous and I hope these muppets will contest and refuse to pay, what a rip off!

Friends has never been available on that has it?

Just had our MD nip off for a months holiday, took his Blackberry (on Vodafone) with him and then put on his Out Of Office Assistant.

Vodafone are charging him £10 per MB of Blackberry traffic while he's out of the UK so now he gets every spam email (and pays for it), his OoO replies to the spam (and he pays for it) and then the OoO replies bounce back to him (and pays for it) so I can't wait to see his Blackberry bill this month.

I suggested that we stop forwarding his email but he wasn't keen in case he missed something important.

Why the penguin ? Read in another set of comments yesterday that penguins don't do spam so I thought it might help !

Its a woman after all, Given a telephone and a credit card she could easily have spent £11000 on shoes alone, Bet she is gutted she only ordered 3 episodes of friends now.

Paris as you just know she could easily spend £11k on some crap of equal value

Mine is the kevlar lined jacket with my blood type printed on the pocket.

there was someone that roamed with his blackberry and due to the way the blackberry works, connecting to the network checking for email and then closing connection, the roaming network was rounding everything UP to 1Mb...so for a small 5 sec connection that uses about 5 / 10kb it was rounding up to 1Mb, every min or whatever it does....that was a large phone bill ;)

It was a work laptop (indicated by vodapain ringing is company) and his wife was downloading and using it, gee how many company laptops get laiden with non company software and spyware due to 3rd parties being allowed access to company laptops you wonder (awaits some jorno wanabe security peep to do a report and charge for it :).

But 4od and the beeb service are cute and nice but when I tried the beeb one I was shocked at how much strain it placed upon my inet. Even when I stopped and deinstalled I was still taking incomming requests from around the world (mainly states - go figure lic payers heh), now I know P2P can be bad but this was horrendous volumes and from a 3 minute start and stop of the application resulting in hits days later, deinstalled never to be touched again. .torrents whilst get the same effect is never that bad and generaly after a hour your clean as incomming wise and thats after a long run.

Sorry but what I've seen from it they might as well be labeled DDOS-ME applications from what I saw and now can be called - LET-MY-WIFE-CAN-ME given by definition he allowed her to install 3rd party software and misappropriate company resources, let alone the roaming rape.

But I've seen companies do worse - like screw up your expenses so you cant pay your rent and other essentials whilst your the otherside of he World doing there business and then when you complain sack you for complaining. But hey we dont all work for Research In Motion - true RIM JOB bunch of cnuts.

--

Paris because he was a fraggle who cried wolf

She puts her knickers back *on* because, obviously, the rest of the day she *doesn't* wear them (due to the bill you already mentioned).

The guy could possibly have used WIFI connection. For so many times, I've tried to use my phone to surf the net through my home wireless and then I could see the signal bar is flashing with 3G then I realised the phone has tried to connect the internet through the network, so I stopped it before it got connected, otherwise, it would have cost me a pound a day. Even I changed the setting to user define connection, sometimes it still connects automatically to the network when I try to browse the website.

F*ck me. 11 grand!

You can buy the entire bloody shoody 400-series run on DVD for about 150 quid!

The false economy of downloading......

IIRC, my Blackberry has a "Disabled while roaming" option for data, so you can avoid getting reamed by overpriced data roaming charges should you go overseas.

Still, I think roaming charges should be cheaper.

Off topic, but the comments about overseas IP addresses reminded me about Mobile IP. The problem facing IP on a mobile phone is that you have to be able seamlessly to migrate from cell to cell, particularly when you're roaming and may be on the road or in a train. So you may be changing your subnet every few minutes, but need to retain a constant IP address on the Internet.

This is achieved using a technique similar to NAT (except you're going from a public address to a public address), so the address you present to the Internet is your 'home' IP (probably in the UK if you have a UK contract). Your home address is actually a device on your providers network which can keep track of your true, physical IP address (known as the 'care of' address) and forward the packet to you, editing the source and destination addresses appropriately.

Like NAT, this has the potential to break IPsec traffic, unless you're aware and take care when you configure it. Like most modern IP extensions, it's a kludge on a kludge, but it works - IPv6 will do all this stuff sooo much better!

There's a good page on Wikipedia :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_IP

with links to the RTFs for those that like their IP down and dirty.

OK, back to moaning about roaming costs - grrr

Apart from the issue of obscene roaming costs why don't you guys realise that the guy is using the excuse that "my ignorant wifey dun it" to get out of paying what he should have known about.

Sometimes wives know more about technology than their supposedly techno-savvy partners but the techno-deficient partners know that business (insurance companies) don't believe this.

Was wifey even included on his trip? Is he, himself, a "Friends" afficionado? Did he have a "friend" with him instead of wifey?

And if wifey was left alone to get so bored that downloading episodes of "Friends" was a reasonable alternative to going out and enjoying the local pastis then he deserves to pay the bill!!

Stop because you have all missed the point! He's an idiot and roaming costs are ridiculous...

You mean like me and my Wife, who were told our overdraft limit had been extended by £500.00, which we then used £100, knowing £200 was going in to the account later in the month. We got a letter a month later saying "you have been charged £150.00 in fees for an unautorised overdraft", because the person in the bank didn't do what he said he would?

We went in to the bank to complain, they denied all knolage and told us we should have checked, which we thought we had, when we asked the member of staff to extend our overdraft. Please explaine how that is my fault? And how exactly that cost the bank £150.00?

As a british expat in the Netherlands I was annoyed to find that 4oD doesnt work from non uk ips. Proxying didnt help either - stingy bastards. Same for BBC iPlayer which makes the TV ads for it that are played here all the more galling. Oh well, at least there's bittorrent :)

I checked the ip from my blackberry (t-mobile) and it resolves to waterlooville UK (I'm sitting in Zurich). That cost me a tenner :/

..Enough of...