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If you’re on O2 and been abroad using your iPhone, have a careful look at your bills, as reports say that some of you are still getting unexpected and wrong data roaming charges.
As we highlighted back in July, people on the Apple forums have been complaining about being charged for data roaming, despite disabling the feature in the iPhone settings.
BBC News report confirmed that O2 has known about the problem for around four months. Orange and Vodafone users don’t seem to have been affected.
In one Apple forum post, Tim Drewett said that while travelling in the US with his iPhone 4, he received a visual voicemail message that triggered the downloading of 25 emails as well as web browsing and app activity.
Others have suffered similar problems, with some getting their money back and some not.
In the most recent post, Steveapple1 wrote, “I also had this problem. I go to France regularly. I switch the data roaming off before I leave the UK and only switch it on when I land back in UK.
“I had £40 of roaming charges for July, phoned 02, had two arguments with them, the third time they agreed to refund, the guy admitted to a fault in the software.”
“Today I noticed more roaming charges for August…. these were refunded immediately.”
“What is O2 going to do about the millions of people with errors in their billing of tens of millions of pounds that have not noticed and complained???”.
We have embedded a YouTube video of a different user who claims to have suffered the problem while in Cyprus this year at the bottom of this post.
The BBC said that O2 was “investigating these reports with Apple”.
Apple said, “We are aware that some O2 customers have reported receiving unexpected data roaming charges and are investigating.”
“To avoid unexpected data roaming charges while travelling outside the UK, O2 customers can turn off Cellular Data in their iPhone settings.”
According to a thread on the O2 forums the same type of problem occurred with early versions of the iOS 3.0 software. This was fixed in version 3.02, but the problem seems to have reoccurred.
Are you an iPhone user on the O2 network and been hit with bills for data roaming you haven’t expected? And whose fault is this, Apple or O2’s? Let us know in the comments.
