Hi all,

I wanted to make you all aware of an issue I've discovered in regards to the National Data packs. Essentially you can end up getting (invisibly) charged for data even when 2Degrees is telling you have National data remaining.

Specifically, I got the warning last Friday (20th) that my data pack was running low. On Tuesday it tried for auto-renewal but it failed because I had a lot less money in my account than I thought - which was a real surprise when I got that text!

Where had my money gone I thought? I still had National Data showing in my balance, but somehow I was certain I had a lot less credit than I should've. So straight to the "Your Usage" section of 2Degrees where I soon calculated that over $11 of credit had vanished at some point between 20th April (my last topup, and I had the text on my phone telling my balance at that point) and now.

During this time I'd always had a 50mb national data pack on my phone, in fact, I'd gone through almost 2. So at no time had I been without a data pack. I was almost through my 2nd pack but I still had some Mb of National Data showing in my balance.

The missing $ just didn't make sense, so I emailed 2Degrees on Tuesday night (still awaiting response) and figured it was just some error somewhere.

However today (Friday) I realised my balance was still going down way too fast - there was now another $3 or so missing between Tuesday night and Friday morning.

Some quick tests soon revealed that although I still had 1.08Mb of National data showing on my phone / Your2Degrees as at Friday morning (27th), whenever I used data on my phone :

• my national data balance was not changing


• my $ balance was decreasing rapidly with every little blip of data used

In other words, even though it should've been drawing on my data balance, it was drawing on my $ balance instead.

I have no idea exactly when this started. My theory is it started last Friday when I got the "your data is running low" text, however the Your Usage section isn't showing any data usage for this week yet. (Surely it should be? I checked my gf's and there was nothing showing there either).

Suffice to say it's a bit of a trap and a great way to rapidly run out of credit.

The "fix" seemed to be to buy another data pack, because when I did that it started drawing on data again instead of my balance. But obviously, you shouldn't have to do this.

And it's quite a trap because (I guess) as my data balance wasn't decreasing, when I did top up again the auto-renewal for the National data pack didn't happen automatically like it's supposed to so I kept getting these invisible charges. (To be honest, the auto-renewal seems a bit hit or miss at times).

My argument isn't that I didn't use the data - I'm sure I did - but if your provider tells you you still have data in credit, then you should expect to be charged as such, and not lose $14 or so.

Ant

*N.b. I mention that the charges are invisible only because they are not visible on the Your Usage section, which appears to be at least a week behind - something that has made it much more difficult to figure out what's happening. I'm not implying any deliberate hidden charging.