O2 texts the end of surfing deal

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O2 leave many customers with large mobile phone bills after ending free internet deal

O2 have had a deal offering free internet surfing for quite some time via GPRS. This encouraged many customers to sign up to the deal to take advantage of browsing the internet free of charge on there O2 mobiles, only to find a few months later that O2 had ended the free service and they were being billed for there internet use! Customers were lured in by the promise of eBay bidding and music video downloads on the move and signed up to 12 month contracts.

As of April this year O2 started charging for their ‘free’ internet service. O2 says that it sent text messages to all its customers to inform them of the change in charges, but many customers did not receive this message and the first they knew about it was when they received a bill leaving many people with large telephone bills, in some cases over £1000.

Sending a text message to inform customers of the change in charges isn’t the best way of informing everyone, which has shown as many people did not receive their text message.

Although text messaging has penetrated our society in such a way that we think of it as one of the top ways to communicate, consumers should know that a text message is not guaranteed to arrive on the recipients phone in a timely manner, and in some cases even arrive at all. No-one should know this better than the network that operates the service, and it is the second example we have seen over the past month of O2 texting the end of a current way of tariff charging.

As we wrote on the 1st of June, O2 recently switched off many old mobile phones from the days when it went by the name Cellnet. To inform the customers who had been with them over 8 years they once again sent a text message that many simply did not receive.

Text messaging needs to be removed immediately as a way of informing customers about vital changes to their services or costs of services. The only really acceptable ways would be to write to them warning of the charges or optimally to call them to ensure they understand what changes are taking place.

If this has happened to you please contact us to let us know your views on the situation and we will see how we can help with any excessive bills you may have received.