Our Spark home phone and VDSL stopped working on the 5th of June at around 10am. I called Spark at lunchtime and the issue was fixed the next day.

While the VDSL was down I decided to connect my laptop and iPad to the internet using the Personal Hotspot feature of my Spark mobile phone. Unfortunately it seems a background process on one of these devices was downloading a lot of data. I managed to use up my entire mobile data allowance for the month, and accumulate $100 of overage charges, within 24 hours. Once I realized that my allowance was gone I bought an additional data pack (6th June at 9:35am).

Half an hour later, at 10:06am, I received three text messages at once - "You recently exceeded 50%/80%/100% of your included data". None of these messages came early enough to allow me to avoid going over my data allowance.

Therefore:

1. I was relying on the data usage warnings to avoid overage charges. I suggest you do not do the same.

2. I have now received a bill which includes $100 of overage charges. Do you think Spark would be willing to remove these charges, given that their system failed to warn me of the situation until it was too late?