Database Info

£1170 pounds bill from o2

hi all just got my monthly bill from o2 today and the cheeky buggers have charged me over a grand for gprs . the funny thing is i dont even use the gprs on my xda2i . so first port of call was to call them and ask what do they think they r playing at . i stated to them i dont even use my gprs on my phone and never have . anyway after talking to 1 of there so called managers he said that the only thing it could be is that someone has hacked into my phone and used my gprs or my gprs is broke on my phone and somehow it has been sending and reciving data . anyway i said to them so what do i do as i am not going to pay this bill of over a grand not a chance . anyway he said i had to put it in wrighting to them stating what happend and send a copy of the bill also . and he also said to cancal my direct debit so i have . the cheek of them the guy said a thousand pound was a lot of gprs data and i said maybe it is a lot of data but it has nothing to do with me . so i have just typed up a 2 page letter to them and it will be in the post first thing in the morning . i will tell u how i get on in the near future when they get back to me . anyway direct debit cancled . o2 bunch of fools why o why did i go back to this company . i have had nothing but trouble with them . just thought i would share my thoughts with all of u

Wow. What rate have they supposedly charged you at? Is it physically possible to have used that much data?
£1120 lets say at £3 p/m is 350 meg or 10 meg a day. Hmmmmm.
But lets say it's £1 a meg for big contract customers, 30 meg a day? They've gotta be kidding!
Never heard of anyone 'hacking' gprs unless they have cloned your sim in which case Jupiter ( as was the o2 billing system) would have picked up 2 handsets on the network at the same time and flagged it.
Richard

maybe u r right i am not sure . either way i dont use the gprs . on my phone and never have i use the wireless while sitting about the house ats it . still i cant wait to see what o2 have to say . coz at the end of the day i am not going to pay this bill not a chance . if ppl cant hack into My phone then the gprs must be broke or something . god i am scared to use my phone as i dont no what else they think they can bi l me for ... still life goes on eh

are you sure the charge is for gprs and not actually for dial up WAP access?
my charmer for some reason, decided to connect to the net overnight (while i was asleep) via dial up WAP even though i have a permanent and unlimited GPRS access.
i noticed this immeadiately in the morning, checked my account online and saw the £37 plus vat charges applied for WAP, called them up and had WAP disabled and the charges refunded.
the most common reason for this to happen is your email/IM or some other prog you have installed set to automatically connect to the net.
on my charmer i suspect it was actually pocket weather doing the deed.
i have applied my own back up fix "just in case" and have taken out of the dial up settings all the "9"'s and replaced them with "x"'s so it cannot dial up at all but if i should need to, i can quickly undo this fix to connect

fluffcat1 said:
Wow. What rate have they supposedly charged you at? Is it physically possible to have used that much data?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
When they incorrectly charged me for two days data in March (thanks O2!!) it came to £117*.
Of course they don't do refunds, but credits, which means they still want you to pay the incorrect bill, to be credited later. Fools.
Can't wait until T-Mobile brings out the Hermes, then I'm gone from O2 forever.
(*I stream radio a lot, and use push email a lot, and download from RSS feeds a lot.)

According to my online bill i'm still not getting charged for GPRS access.

fluffcat1 said:
Wow. What rate have they supposedly charged you at? Is it physically possible to have used that much data?
£1120 lets say at £3 p/m is 350 meg or 10 meg a day. Hmmmmm.
But lets say it's £1 a meg for big contract customers, 30 meg a day? They've gotta be kidding!
Never heard of anyone 'hacking' gprs unless they have cloned your sim in which case Jupiter ( as was the o2 billing system) would have picked up 2 handsets on the network at the same time and flagged it.
Richard
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I'm not actually suprised. When my corporate 9100 arrived at the beginning of using it I fortunately loaded the gprs monitor.
Our exchange support team had set the push mail up a bit heavily. In addition to email it tuned out they were pushing 700kb an hour to my phone regardless of my receiving any mail.
Until i started to read the gprs report i was running between 11-16mb a day (approx 700kb an hour background). Once I realised what it was doing I turned push off and had it running autosync every 10 mins 0700-2200 with every hour overnight (approx 40kb per hour background).
It may be corporate money, but until they sort it out 10 minute sync is good enough as at least I can control it.
Data dropped to 800k-2mb per day... much more sensible.
Its a bit like those pesky joke sms msgs, you don't know you've been charged until the end of them month.

Agree with u on 02 incompetence. They could not tell me which speed/size of SD cards are compatible with my EXec. Asked me to phone Sandisk!! Incompetence exemplified - after I held on for over an hour for technical support. Plus voicemail is not time stamped, u can't tell when they r left nor can u repeat a current msg without getting to the end of all the new messages first!!

belfast-biker said:
When they incorrectly charged me for two days data in March (thanks O2!!) it came to £117*.
Of course they don't do refunds, but credits, which means they still want you to pay the incorrect bill, to be credited later. Fools.
Can't wait until T-Mobile brings out the Hermes, then I'm gone from O2 forever.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
O2 strike again. Didn't pay last months bill (my fault) of £120, and this months bill with those arrears, is £407. ON a basic rental of £35 and not going over miutes or texts.
£120 arrears (fair enough)
£35 rental
£80 data (jesus, and this is with push email turned off)
And the rest? They now want me to pay out the remainder of my contract, presumably because of my non payment last month? I don't know. They didn't say. But they do say in the email:
"The balance on your account shows that you do not owe us any money." and;
"You will see that your first bill contains two line rental charges, one for your first month and the second for the next month (in advance). "
Which is... bizarre. Total fools.
Anyhow, could not wait any longer with that level of sheer stupidity, so I've just gone and sorted myself out with the monthly £7.50/50minutes contract with T-Mobile, to wihch I'll add the £7.50 webnwalk unlimited data bundle.
Bliss.

tmobile web'n'walk is an invention of genius
£7.50 a month, as much data as you can possibly get out of it provided it's not p2p or streaming video
makes push email unnecessary when you can set your email to check every couple of minutes

agentp said:
tmobile web'n'walk is an invention of genius
£7.50 a month, as much data as you can possibly get out of it provided it's not p2p or streaming video
makes push email unnecessary when you can set your email to check every couple of minutes
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I thought that too, but push email gives you OTA syncing of your calendar, contacts and tasks too...

How Much Data do you use?

How much Data do you use in a month. I finally made the plunge to a Pocket PC Phone, an HTC TYTN. So far I am loving it. It takes a lot of getting use to the way you dial phone numbers vs my old Motorola V3i flip phone, but none the less this is a great phone.
Back to the question at hand. How much data do you use in a month, what do you do with your phone.
I am trying to justify the size of the data plan I should be on. I am on some sort of Starter plan for the moment which I know won't be enough.
Average I plan to download about 20 emails a day and respond to about 5, use MSN Messenger for a few hours at least.
Spend an hour a day on websites. (no heavy graphics pages)
So how much do you use,

I'm currently using around 75-100megabytes a month sending/receving 20-40 emails a day, as well as heavy browsing of HoFo, XDA, and various blogs during downtime. I also subscribe to various RSS feeds via Outlook 2007, and then syncing those folders via Exchange.

when I was using my hermes with pieplus and images off i was going to about 200mb a month. After allowing images that jumped to 400-500mb a month. I am now doing everything on it and using it as a modem and i am up to 2gb a month. I download a lot of podcasts every week and youtube really burns the bandwidth.
The only affordable way I know of to do this is with three. it costs me $40 aud a month and I also get 4000 minutes of unmetred skype that I cant actually use because they only do it with a preconfigured symbian version of skype. there are also email and tv bundled with my account but i have not used those yet. the email is supposed to be unmetered so I guess that would mean that attachments would cost nothing to download, are there any other three members who can confirm this?

I'm suprised we haven't seen any of the 10GB slingbox users represent yet. Come on you guys, we know you're in the woodwork.

I signed up for unlimited data package for a fixed monthly rate.
Using push mail ( on all the time), browsing the net using Opera Mini (eurosports and this wonderful forum most of the time ).
regards,
morisa

Unless you're downloading a ton of attachments, email is most likely not going to push you over 10MB, even with a few hundred a month. Push adds a little overhead, but assuming a 24 hours a day, 7 days a week connection, thats still only around 1MB of data.

Well on Rogers in BC Canada, 500mb plan would be $210, which is way more expensive than I wanted to go. I am looking at the 100mb plan,
$60 25MB per month additional $7 per MB 101 to 300 e-mails per day
That is on top of the $100 per month for my regular cell contract.

Ouch, that really sucks. At those rates, it's probaly cheaper to get a Blackberry or something from Cingular with the Unlimited International Roaming, which I believe is only $70. However, that's probaly not what you want to do, so you're best bet is probaly to get something like SPB GPRS Monitor and have it cut off data usage at 95% of maximum alloted.

Thanks Urthwhyte
I will have to look up that app and install it. Right now I don't have a clue how much data I am using.
For reference here is a link to the data plans available to me. (note that does not include my $100 per month for my voice contract.)
Link to Rogers Data Plans and Pricing.

I'm currently using http://www.spbsoftwarehouse.com/products/gprsmonitor/?en but I also beleive the newest beta version of batterystatus also does monitoring. If you only intend to use email, you should be more than fine with 25MB of usage. However, anything other than extremely light webbrowsing will go through that in a heartbeat.

I use a Trinity Wm6 PDAVIET 3.07.17
I'm a heavy data user.. from 5-20 Gb a month.
I use MyMail Visto Mail for my corporate work email, hotmail and yahoo mail as personal. about 60 emails a day
I constantly download mp3 mainly from Google search and projectplaylist hack. (copying the url of the song and downloading it)
I constantly download flash games mainly from Google search of .sfw and using the flashlite player.
I use GoogleMaps with the built in GPS
Custom 401/DVP/427 traffic monitoring every 1 min via PIE
I check stocks on Finance.yahoo.com every 30min.
I also use Orb.com for Live TV. Torrentspy.com via a WM6 WinMobile Torrent for movies.
looks like bit throttling over UMTS isnt active yet... I get great download speeds of 1mb+
nightly download of ebook reading via Google Scholar search of PDF in my area of interests.
I do tons of general surfing..
Yup I'm addicted!!!!!

At the Canadian data rates?

When it comes to raw downloading that will all be done by my home server, I have a 10mb (speeds of roughly 1000kBps) cable internet connection and 2tb of data storage at my house. I could never see trying to do torrents on my cell. However it is a neat concept.
Thanks again for the monitoring link, that should come in really helpful.

I have not noticed any throttling when on my phone internet either. I occasionally use it to finish off a torrent and it seems that it just goes full speed. My greatest enemy is other users. When nobody knew about the service i use i could easily get onto hspda with my trinity or hermes, speeds of 800kbs+. now there are adds everywhere for the $30 1gb data modem pack i find that in normal hours i can only get standard umts speeds of 256-300kbs.
it does not matter for the bulk of my use. when used purely as a pda it seems windows mobile can not get anywhere near the speed my laptop sees. it feels like a 56kbs dial up connection when opening pages. I don't know if its the rendering in pie or just wm, if i use minimo it is MUCH slowers still.
edit: i just downloaded a 24mb podcast in the time it took to type this post!

No problem, have fun with your new phone!

So far the most data I have used is just over 22GB.

I use my device as my home internet connection. I run xbox live gaming and stream video to my laptop connected to my TV for home television. Works great! I have unlimited data (AT&T) on Samsung Captivate with HSDPA/UPA enabled and run it with wireless tether.
Can easily use 1 GB in a day

Usually a little less than 20MB but my boyfriend has unlimited data on his iphone so if I wanna stream something i usually don't use my iphone

Im currently near the end of my billing Cycle, and Tmobile is listing me as using 3.1GBs. Last month I had 8.3GBs.
I stream lots of youtube, and Pandora. As well as stream animes from animenewsnetwork when im bored. I have email set up for my dad's business since I handle all emails / invoices for him.
Dont really tether since I dont have any other device to connect to it, other then my PC, but it has its own connection.

as per my usage i can get 18gb per month with only 50kbps with unlimited data plan on airtel edge

Minutes that never expire? Is there such a thing?

Guys, does anyone offer minutes that never expire or at least last a year or so? I don't call much and besides, I want this as a backup phone/option.
Thanks
George

AT&T here in the states have plans that include rollover anytime mins that carry over up 12 months.

I have like 10,000 rollover minutes with AT&T

Most UK Pay as you go options don't have a time limit on the credit applied. So that should sort of work.

Thanks but ATT here is too expensive for me. They also charge extra 30 or so just for you to use your phone as a hot spot so it comes to around 100 which is why I switched from them to t mobile.
The idea is NOT to buy a monthly plan with rollover mins. I never use that many mins. Just something paid up front with x amount of mins for the phone, texting and x amount of gigs of data transfer and that does not expire for instance for a year if you don't use it.
That or some really cheap monthly fee with similar features.
Thanks

Cheapest T-mobile/AT&T GSM plan available?

I don't call much and I never go over my 4-500 minutes on T-mobile so I'm looking for something cheap. I have a Nexus 1 with Froyo so something compatible and I would like data so I can take advantage of the fact that my Nexus works as a hot spot. Don't need much data either. I SELDOM get online and when I do, it's never video or anything.
Thanks
George

I'm Not
I'm not on a plan.
I'm on prepaid with T-Mobile
this is the cheapest plan u will ever get
1) prepaid (you can use any T-Mobile or AT&T unlocked Phone)
2) i pay 10 dollars every 3-4 months
3) all my minutes last 1 year (or till used up)
How is this possible might you ask ?
once you spend 100 dollars on minutes you are automatically added to their Gold Rewards pre paid plan, which gives you more minutes per purchase and all your minutes last a year instead of 90 days.
NOW heres the trick
NEVER answer your phone OR make a call on it
it coasts you nothing to receive a call ONLY to answer and make them
download Skype (ON your computer) at 3 dollars a month "all you can eat" out going phone calls to any phone in the US. Once someone calls you, you call them back with Skype (assuming you do not have a home phone like me)
ALSO you can get a Skype home phone number for 20 dollars a year (i do not use this)
People will QUICKLY learn that once they call u to wait 1 min and you will call them back, If you are at home, if you are out and about there is 2 ways to handle this
1) answer the phone BUT make it short and sweet
2) if they need to get a-hold of you quickly, use one of these two steps
2a) if you did not call them back in a min (or 2) and they know you are out. after calling you have them send u a text message (this will cost you 5 cents)
2b) have them call you 2 times in a row, to let you know they need to talk asap
it took me a few month to learn this trick! so at first i had to buy lower cost per min deals (IE: 50-100 dollars at a time for 13-10 cents per minute) it's hard not to answer the phone as soon as it rings. but once you get the knack down and resist the urge to answer at once and wait a min, you can get away with buy 10 dollars at a time at 33 cents per min BUT u will barely use them! the longest i have gone without buy more minutes was around 7 months. because people feel they need to talk ASAP and cant wait till u get home, i average buying minutes every 3 to 4 months
your friends and family will pick this up REAL quick
so basically you are only paying 3 dollars a month
PLUS minutes 3-4 times a year
and when u get really good at it you can get away with buying only 10 dollars at a time (costs more per minute but you will not use them much if at all)
______________________________________________
here is a breakdown on their minutes:
Refill value * Whenever Minutes® / Minutes Expire
$10 30 min / 90 days 35 min / 1 year
$25 130 min / 90 days 150 min / 1 year
$50 400 min / 90 days 460 min / 1 year
$100 1000 min / 1 year*
Cost per minute
$100 10¢/min. 1000 minutes*
$50 13¢/min. 400 minutes
$30 19¢/min. 160 minutes
$10 33¢/min. 30 minutes
Does not include price per minute for gold rewords plan (excluding the $100)
so once u spend 100 dollars you price per minute will go down slightly
______________________________________________
DATA:
1 dollar a day (24 hours) all u can download
OR
Week Pass (7 days) * 100 MB * $10
Month Pass (30 days) * 300 MB * $30
Week Pass (7 days) * 1 GB * $50
______________________________________________
things to be forewarned of!
I had a new GF use up all my minutes one time before i knew this, JUST sending me Text Messages and i never even replied to her, i read her messages and called her:
T-Mobile Prepaid text messaging rate information
As a T-Mobile Prepaid customer, you are able to send and receive text messages to and from your phone. Text and instant messages are $0.10 each to send and $0.05 to receive in the US and Canada; $0.35 to send and $0.05 to receive everywhere else.

I dont' wish to sound ungrateful but there's no way I could stick to this 'cause I'm a dumbass. NOT that I HAVE To answer when it rings, tha'ts NOT a problem, but I'll mess it up somehow, trust me on this.
I like it though but the data plan is where it would kill me and bring me back to more normal rates anyway. I guess I could just skip the data plan. It's not like I ever bring my puter with me and when I do, I could look for a hot spot. Too bad I live out in a **** hold. Makes things harder
Thanks

I was at Wally world today and decided (per someone's recommendation) to try their family plan with unlimited talk and text and 100mb data for 45 bucks a month. Let's see how that works out. Not sure how long 100mb will last me but considering I only look up stuff like addresses, movies and phone numbers, I should be good. I Forgot to ask if there was some warning that you ran out of data usage so to speak.

[SOLVED - Bug in T-Mo system] 2G data not working?

I was on EDGE earlier today and was not able to get anything going with the internet. Then I pull out my wife's G2 with the same T-Mobile service and she was getting everything fine.
I have the default settings. Not sure what's going on...?

I found out last night that T-Mobile USA had a bug in their system for people upgrading their phone and changing to the new Value plans.
I was on Even More Plus 500, unlimited text and web. In order for me to make payments on the phone (I can't justify spending $500 at once on a phone in my head), I would have to upgrade to the Value plan (similar 500 minutes, unlimited text, and "unlimited" 2GB web). So everything seemed fine until I could not get a data connection at all. Only under wifi could I actually use the phone's data connectivity.
Turns out the system was buggy and upgrades to the Value from Even More Plus weren't working. I was entered into a 2 year contract with the Even More Plus plan for some reason, which basically messed up my data connection.
An online chat with customer service for 20 minutes did the trick and I'm back in business.

rorytmeadows said:
I found out last night that T-Mobile USA had a bug in their system for people upgrading their phone and changing to the new Value plans.
I was on Even More Plus 500, unlimited text and web. In order for me to make payments on the phone (I can't justify spending $500 at once on a phone in my head), I would have to upgrade to the Value plan (similar 500 minutes, unlimited text, and "unlimited" 2GB web). So everything seemed fine until I could not get a data connection at all. Only under wifi could I actually use the phone's data connectivity.
Turns out the system was buggy and upgrades to the Value from Even More Plus weren't working. I was entered into a 2 year contract with the Even More Plus plan for some reason, which basically messed up my data connection.
An online chat with customer service for 20 minutes did the trick and I'm back in business.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
ya T-mobile fixed it in their system last night