Meteor’s magical €60 roaming charge

Meteor wanted Terry to pay €720 in roaming for a year. €60 a month direct debit, just for the roaming switch to be pushed on a Pay As You Go account. It is a fucking disgrace.

Just last week Meteor wanted my housemate, a new Bill Pay customer, to pay €60 as security in her first month, so that she could roam while away in Sweden. Meteor told her that they don’t enable roaming on new accounts until after the second bill. And that if she wanted to pay the €60 security, it would not be refunded until the second bill.

Smells of rank mistrust of customers. If new and Pay As You Go customers are trusted to pay charges incurred nationally, is it not discriminatory to blacken them with a cloud of mistrust when they roam? How about the revolutionary idea of charging customers an eat-as-they-go menu?

Do Meteor have trust issues? And isn’t it weird how the amount in both cases is that round figure of €60? Coincidence? Do other mobile operators do this?

August 19th, 2008 at 9:17 am • Filed in Geekery



Comments

7 Comments to “Meteor’s magical €60 roaming charge”

  1. Twenty Major Says:
    August 19th, 2008 at 9:37 am

    That happened to me with Meteor - the €60 was just credit on the account and it basically paid my bill for the second month so it wasn’t that big a deal.

    Having just changed to O2 I was a bit taken aback to be told I wasn’t allowed make international calls for 3 months unless I showed them a Meteor bill which proved I could make international calls with them. This was after they double-billed me for the first month (standard practice apparently) and I’m paying an iPhone tariff.

    I think they’re just all cunts.



  2. Maz Says:
    August 19th, 2008 at 10:06 am

    This happened to me too, in Finland, only we didn’t know about it til we got there. My boyfriend and I are both with Meteor Pay as you go and when we got off the plane in Finland our phones wouldn’t connect to any network. Luckily Mike had his laptop with him and we made a skype call to Meteor, they explained about filling in a DD mandate and topping up with €60 as well. In the end, they agreed to let Mike’s brother come into the meteor store in Galway and put up his own money and DD mandate.

    It has something to do with the way they handle pay as you go in Scandinavia…credit is not reduced in real time so technically you could spend more credit than you have.



  3. Alexia Says:
    August 19th, 2008 at 10:33 am

    @Twenty: Double charging is the cherry on top, isn’t it? Especially when iPhone owners are paying through the nose for their call plans. Bet you didn’t get a naff white one.

    I’m going away next month. Looking forward to not being able to roam with them already.

    @Maz: Demanding €60 top-up from Terry whether he uses it or not and accumulating that money month after month goldfish-style is scandalous.

    And I can’t for the life of me understand why they want to charge Bill Pay customers. Are we not liable for charges on our account anyway?



  4. Sabrina Dent Says:
    August 19th, 2008 at 1:00 pm

    It isn’t just Pay As You Go customers they’re attempting to hit with these one-off charges. I am a new (ish) Meteor customer, paying monthly by Direct Debit, and to turn on international calls and texts they wanted me to either a) Wait for 3 months of direct debit payments to have gone through, or b) Pay then €60 to turn it on now. I chose c) Neither.

    Lo and behold it started working on its own a month later.



  5. Daragh Says:
    August 19th, 2008 at 11:35 pm

    Meteor definitely have trust issues. Maybe they attract a high proportion of customers who try to rip them off?
    I almost signed up with them a few months back, went through the whole sign-up process for a post-pay account in the Grafton Street branch, to be told in the end that my account was “flagged” and I’d have to pay a €300 deposit to activate. I walked down the street to Three and had no such issues with them, they signed me up straight away. I had subsequent issues with Three but that’s another story…



  6. Meteor demand their international calling blood money : Alexia Golez Says:
    September 1st, 2008 at 8:57 am

    [...] more I write about mobile, the more horror stories I find. Remember the post I recently did where Meteor were demanding €60 as a deposit against call charges incurred whilst roaming. Well, it seems they are demanding the very same sum [...]



  7. Ex telecoms employee Says:
    October 1st, 2008 at 10:42 am

    I dunno, I used to work in this industry and the reasons behind the deposits is simple - massive amounts of fraud that happen every day. Its the same as the ESB and Bord Gais who now require deposits of between 200 and 400 for bills to be taken out that aren’t DD and for deposits for customers who are connecting for the first time.

    It’s a €60 deposit - its not the end of the world and, what you all seem to be missing is the defintion of the word deposit - IE YOU GET IT BACK… Whether its off a bill or a cheque that comes to you. So build a fricking bridge people.

    Thousands of phones are bought and traded across Europe every year, and these phones are used to make high cost roaming calls until they are eventually disconnected. Then the high quality (usually) handset is essentially sim free and the person has done a runner. Its just a security measure, its not discrimination, its not really that much and its not that unfair.

    For pay as you go customers the reason that its different with Meteor is the differences in their persecond billing system - as in they don’t operate off one for roaming - so although your usage is eventually calculated per minute its not immediate - so you could talk and talk and then finally realise that your call credit’s in the red.

    And, just for the record I went to Spain and as a Meteor customer for less than a year I had roaming, and the VF customer that I was travelling with didn’t.



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