A student who had been using mobile broadband services whilst studying in Paris has expressed his shock after being hit with a bill for nearly eight thousand pounds by the Internet service provider Orange.

A student who has been studying in Paris has recently expressed his horror at receiving a bill for nearly eight thousand pounds from his mobile broadband provider Orange. William Harrison, aged twenty two, is thought to have been hit with the bill because protection regulations designed to stop people running up and receiving such huge bills have taken so long to put into place. These regulations are set to come in around March of this year.

The student explained that before he went to France he visited an Orange store to ask about the suitability of mobile broadband for use in France, and he was advised by staff at the store that their mobile broadband service would be ideal and would offer a perfectly ample 3GB limit on data. He said: “The woman in the store said the dongle would work perfectly in France, especially for a short-term contract. She said there was a 3GB (gigabyte) limit on data use but that this would be ‘perfectly ample’.”

Harrison stated that he had not used his mobile broadband service to access anything such as videos that would have used a lot of data. He said that he had been using it mainly to use Skype, which he had access to for free on his home computer. He said that he had no idea how expensive this was on mobile broadband.

He added that the first bill he received was for just over six thousand pounds, stating: “I immediately questioned it and asked for the dongle to be blocked. But there was a further charge which covers the cost of the dongle use between the bill being sent and the dongle being blocked. I am now faced with a bill of £7,648.77. It is an absolutely awful situation, both in the short term because of the £8,000 debt and in the long term because the potential damage to my credit rating could be disastrous.”

Source – Guardian