Sandton man charged R46 000 for international roaming
SANDTON - A Sandton businessman was billed R46 000 by his service provider for international roaming while he was on holiday.
Kyle White received a bill of R46 000 for data roaming from Vodacom while he was on holiday in Mauritius in December last year.
According to White’s blog, his wife and him had decided not to use international roaming while on holiday as the resort they were staying at had free WiFi, however White attempted to switch on his roaming facility on the second to last day of the holiday to check his voicemail’s and text messages. White said he was not able to access his voicemail and did not receive any text messages so he assumed that the connection had failed.
At 5.39am the next day, as White was about to board his flight back to South Africa he received a trail of SMSes from Vodacom notifying him of 2 000 incremental spends on his device. The total cost of which was R46 000.
On White’s blog he questioned why Vodacom did not block the account when such a high bill was being tailed.
He also asked why he did not receive any notifications of his data roaming expenditure when Vodacom’s website stated: “We want you to stay in control of your data roaming spend when you’re abroad – so we offer a data spend alert system that notifies you at R2 000 increments of data spent. You don’t have to do anything – we’ll text you for free.”
White explained, “Vodacom charged me at a rate of R138 per megabyte. It works out to a data usage of just over 300MB whilst overseas.”
After numerous appeals to Vodacom and visits to Vodaworld in Midrand, White eventually conceded to pay R32 000 which the service provider accepted.
Spokesperson for Vodacom, Richard Boorman told eNCA that data pricing was determined by the foreign networks. In Mauritius it would either have been Emtel or Cellplus, and those costs were passed on to the customer.
He further explained, “Since the systems of separate operators are not connected in real time, there can be a delay before the billing reflects at our end.”
“To help protect customers, we send SMSs giving details of exactly how much calls and data cost as soon as the customer arrives at their destination. “We also provide a range of service such as SMS Roamer that help people manage their spend while outside South Africa.”
Boorman said Vodacom was investigating White’s case.
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