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I’ve had run ins with these before, policies to stop people and businesses taking liberties with so called unlimited bandwidth plans. 

To be fair, it wasn’t, fair usage I mean, I was on a plan.

Fair usage (F.U.) got me started because, if you go onto an unlimited plan the companies protect themselves with a F.U. policy, yet very little of any of the system seems fair for the customer. 

My first experience was with 3G and I got charged through the nose for going over my 5 gig monthly mobile broadband bandwidth allowance. They sent warning emails to the address dedicated to the SIM of my broadband modem, all emails allowing me to become their customer in the first place were sent to my primary email address, if they’d been sent there I wouldn’t have exceeded the limit. Not to worry, you can instantly top up your account, on receipt of a warning, using the online top up facility, brilliant. Except the top up won’t be applied until the end of the month, so you’ll be incurring more charges… Why have “instant” top up if it isn’t? Unless to deliberately confuse and mislead? 

My most recent experience is currently ongoing with BT. Exactly the same thing, I exceeded my allowance, they sent warning emails to my BT email address? Not the address they’d used in all other aspects of our business relationship. Because these emails went to the, as far as I’m concerned, wrong address, I incurred significant excess bandwidth charges I would not otherwise have incurred.

They’re not actually breaking any rules, but planned lack of clarity and excessively complex, rigid rules do appear to make these companies millions of pounds a year, so maybe they should be?

I personally think this is reason enough not to have to pay, but knowing the way of big business knew I wouldn’t normally stand a chance appealing the charges. Due to some, I thought, extenuating circumstances, specific to my case I decided to give it a go and sent them the following email.

“Hi

Hopefully not going to grow into a complaint but I couldn’t find a relevant option.

I was nearly killed in a two car runnning over incident 18/12/07 and in care (not home) for 6 months. I am survivivng on only benefits and going in for reconstructive surgery on Thursday.

I don’t remember much before the “incident” and had been on massive doses fo morphine from 18/12/07-23/5/08 and somewhat “sketchy”

Hence my surprise to recieve an £80+ bill for exceeding my allowance. I didn’t even remember I had a BT email account, let alone that notifications went to it of great importance.

I have just signed up for total broadband and hub phone and am a happy and loyal customer who in this instance hopes you will waive the excess bandwidth charges in these special circumstances.

Yours hopefully”

I received this reply

“Thank you for your e-mail dated 10/2/09 regarding broadband excess usage charges.

I understand that these are distressing times for you. However, let me try to ease out the situation for you.

I have checked your bill and can see that the there are excess usage charges for broadband for £41.86. Please contact our fair usage team at 0800 707 6044 (mon-fri 08:00-17:00) and they should be able to help you with these charges.

However, I can see that you have recently upgraded your Broadband to option 3 on 13/02/09 and this option will provide you with the luxury of unlimited usage.

Please feel free to contact me for further assistance.

Thank you for contacting BT.

Yours sincerely”

How did they “ease the situation for” me? 

I called the fair usage team and Ben very politely and helpfully told me that their policy is never to waive excess usage charges in any circumstance. So now I’m writing to bt plc correspondence centre, durham, dh981bt, but Ben assures me I’m wasting my time.

This really annoys me, isn’t it a buyers market? Aren’t we keen to save money? Why don’t we stand up for ourselves? For example with phone, broadband, whatever, why don’t we get to carry over and bank our unused allowance? We must loose millions more in unclaimed allowances a year.