Vodem Billing hell

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rscole86

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#91251 16-Oct-2007 16:16

simon14:
Anyway, two sides here... your son should have managed his usage better! But in sayign that, Vodafone shouldn't let customers spend $1000 in excess fees each month... they should of suspended the account when it got to $200 over or called them or something, they should offer a capped plan so this doesnt happen to people!

I agree that $1000 is over the top, however VF do offer people the option of setting monthly credit limits, sometimes they won't even let you sign-up unless you have one. So if the OP did not ask for a credit limit, then they should take more care of their usage.

chakkaradeep

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#91253 16-Oct-2007 16:22

Simon,

simon14:
Excuse me but are you an idiot?
He said they have contacted Vodafone on several occasions....

As rscole86 has pointed out, do behave yourself in a public forum and also in the way of addressing people.

To Moderators,

Can any moderator please ask simon14 to remove/edit his post accordingly. Its really sad to see people like simon14 in a good forum !

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paradoxsm

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#91255 16-Oct-2007 16:26

Simon14 "inactive user" lol that'll teach him.

Does the Vodafone website under MYA have a "usage" meter similar to thr 777 one?

chakkaradeep

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#91261 16-Oct-2007 16:55

paradoxsm: Simon14 "inactive user" lol that'll teach him.

Yea, I just noticed that.

Thanks Moderators :)

c3rn

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#91280 16-Oct-2007 20:08

rscole86:
I agree that $1000 is over the top, however VF do offer people the option of setting monthly credit limits, sometimes they won't even let you sign-up unless you have one. So if the OP did not ask for a credit limit, then they should take more care of their usage.

FYI: VF has stopped provisioning credit limits until further notice. Also, I agree with the majority of people here and I think that the OP's son has to take some responsibility. It would be interesting if the OP advised how much data was acutally used in a month as the bundle insurance should have kicked in - you don't have to ask VF for this service. With that in mind, for a $1000 bill they would have had to use 3Gb + another 3Gb + 2Gb in excess data - 8Gb on a 3Gb plan? How is this VF's fault??

MikeGayner

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#91385 17-Oct-2007 17:04

I have a friend who foolishly signed up to this same plan. He barely uses his computer, and never for more than email and a bit of web surfing. If you told him to stop using file sharing, he would want to know wtf file sharing is. And yet, every single month (he's had it for 6 motnhs) he's received absolutely outrageous bills - the smallest was over $500. Every month he has to phone up and contest the bill, just to have it remedied because it's an obvious error. And every month they promise it wont happen again.

All this, and he has a credit limit of about $50 or something around that - a credit limit which has not once worked. He desperately wants to get out of this ridiculous contract - Vodafone clearly have serious billing issues, and they most certainly SHOULD be enforcing credit limits rather than producing these huge bills.

And before it's mentioned - no, there is no trojan, no virus, no mysterious problem using all his bandwidth. I've looked at his PC, and examined it for any issues which may be causing excess usage, and there's nothing.

cokemaster

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#91397 17-Oct-2007 18:12

MikeGayner:
All this, and he has a credit limit of about $50 or something around that - a credit limit which has not once worked. He desperately wants to get out of this ridiculous contract - Vodafone clearly have serious billing issues, and they most certainly SHOULD be enforcing credit limits rather than producing these huge bills.

Vodafones page on credit limits used to state:

If you exceed your Credit Limit you can still receive calls and TXTs from other people, but you wont be able to make any more calls (except to 111) until you bring your balance back under your limit.

Because not all call costs are processed immediately, you may occasionally exceed your limit, especially with:

International calls – billed up to 24 hours after your call.
0900 calls – can take up to 3 weeks to reach your account.
Your monthly rate plan fee counts toward your credit limit – think of your Credit Limit as the amount you have left after your monthly rate plan fee is taken out.
free2Call 0800 – if you have a free2call 0800 number, they will be charged to your account even if you exceed your limit.

Additionally in the Vodafone On Account terms and conditions:

So basically, the self imposed credit limits are more of a guide - you can't go all out and expect no charges.

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c3rn

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#91422 17-Oct-2007 21:38

MikeGayner: I have a friend who foolishly signed up to this same plan. He barely uses his computer, and never for more than email and a bit of web surfing. If you told him to stop using file sharing, he would want to know wtf file sharing is. And yet, every single month (he's had it for 6 motnhs) he's received absolutely outrageous bills - the smallest was over $500. Every month he has to phone up and contest the bill, just to have it remedied because it's an obvious error. And every month they promise it wont happen again.

All this, and he has a credit limit of about $50 or something around that - a credit limit which has not once worked. He desperately wants to get out of this ridiculous contract - Vodafone clearly have serious billing issues, and they most certainly SHOULD be enforcing credit limits rather than producing these huge bills.

And before it's mentioned - no, there is no trojan, no virus, no mysterious problem using all his bandwidth. I've looked at his PC, and examined it for any issues which may be causing excess usage, and there's nothing.

Perhaps if he isn't that tech-savy he did something without realising? Even if VF's credit limit system was working it doesn't apply to data anyway. My suggestion: install something like DU Meter which will moniter all data sent and recived from the computer it's installed on and then compare that to the VF bill??

RedJungle

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#91473 18-Oct-2007 10:51

There was a piece on Fair Go this week regarding Vodafone's 'credit limits' and lack of enforcement thereof. The conclusion was that Vodafone are unable to enforce them since their system upgrade and will now be contacting and crediting those affected. There seems to have been a lot of people affected, and one does get the impression that they would have been expected to pay up if not for Fair Go getting involved. :(

For those interested a video of the piece available on the TVNZ site, it's on the right of the page under 'related video' titled 'What limit?'.

freitasm

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#91476 18-Oct-2007 11:04

Expect to see something on Stuff sometime soon - I am just off the phone with the Infotech folks who are working on an article about the Vodafone billing experiences...

billirwin

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#91751 19-Oct-2007 20:24

ok OP here, interesting to see how people jump to conclusions and run all over the place here. I also conclude several of the posters may be Vodafone employees, quick to place all blame on the end user. They obviously did not read the original post.

Whatever, for sake of completeness, I'm just going to pop back in and let you know the outcome. After finally finding someone at the end of the help line who took an interest in sorting the mess out, my son detailed all the times over the preceeding month he had tried to contact / sort out the billing without success. He also pointed out the discrepancy in the usage meter figures with actual, and the fact that he had not been made aware of any capping options. All he wanted was a fair go.

This kindly person at Vodafone agreed there were major issues wit the billing procedure and inacuracy of metering, and agreed to credit the excess usage. All in all a fair outcome, just a shame it was so hard to get.

freitasm

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#91753 19-Oct-2007 21:36

The only confirmed VFNZ employee here is johnr...

Good to know something happened, but still not explained - what happens next month? Because if there's a billing problem a credit this month won't solve it for next month.

exportgoldman

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#91770 20-Oct-2007 10:21

chakkaradeep:
As far as I know the VMC software stores and retrieves last usage from the system and not from the billing system. If you just remove certain things from your system, that is, the VMCLite from your personal folder, and check VMC software, the usage will start again from zero . I had that once, but now I dont touch anything and leave the application to do its work and you would get good results.

We screen grabs of the software showing Approx 200MB of data usage, and Vodafone's systems showing Approx 470MB, and when we tried to get this sorted out, we were told by our Account Manager than in no uncertain terms Vodafone's billing system was correct, and their software clients were using was not to be used to correctely measure MB usage, since the data was collected in completely different ways (and in favour to Vodafone I might add, since the card software always showed lower usage than billing.)

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exportgoldman

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#91771 20-Oct-2007 10:32

I dug this email out which highlights billing problems dating back to Mac 06, which show 200MB variations in a 465MB bill between the VMC software and billing systems. We never recieved a closing e-mail about this, only voice as I don't think they wanted to put in writing their billing problems.

From: [hidden]

Sent: Monday, 20 March 2006 5:59 p.m.

To: Tyler Rosolowski

Subject: RE: Vodafone 3G card screen dumps

Importance: High

Tyler

I have checked the system for the data usage – 456MB was used on the card for the month of February. This could be rounding – there were certainly a lot of individual sessions of relatively small usage – and the software is provided as an indication only however I am surprised that is that far out and will get one of our specialists to look into it further.

I will also check that the 250MB allowance was correctly deducted – unless this was roaming data, there should clearly have been only 200MB charged for, and I will get someone to check this for you as well.

It may take a while – unfortunately I am struggling with a major bid which ahs to be submitted next Tuesday, and this is chewing up most of my time – I will get you a response next week however.

Regards

[hidden]

________________________________________

From: Tyler Rosolowski [mailto:tyler@computersrus.co.nz]

Sent: Tuesday, 14 March 2006 1:20 p.m.

To: [hidden]

Subject: FW: Vodafone 3G card screen dumps

Importance: High

[Hidden,

Here are the screen dumps from the Vodafone connect card which shows the user using 300MB instead of 500MB – Question, should these not correlate?

What’s the use of the software if it is so different?

Tyler - Parnell Geek - iPhone 3G - Lenovo X301 - Kaseya - Great Western Steak House, these are some of my favourite things.

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