I have some sympathy for Michael Matheson, the Scottish health secretary who clocked up an £11,000 data roaming charge on his iPad when abroad.
It’s easily done - especially if children are involved - and the reason I know this is because something similar happened to a friend of mine a few years ago.
His daughter went on a school trip to Europe and a few weeks after returning home the monthly bill for her iPad had an excess charge of €20,000.
A brief investigation revealed that it was the result of the daughter using her iPad to watch a film, with all the excess data and roaming charges that involved.
My friend naturally took this up with the network provider, arguing that a 16-year-old couldn’t be expected to know the financial implications of using the iPad in exactly the same way that she used it at home.
If I remember, the company pointed out that she would have received warnings, but they had been ignored.
Nevertheless, my friend (who is quite well off) threatened the company with m’learned friends and they dropped the additional charge as a ‘goodwill’ gesture, but it shows how easy it is to rack up roaming charges when abroad.
Funnily enough, I was thinking about this even before I read the Matheson story because as soon as I landed in Cork on Monday and turned on my phone and iPad I received messages from Vodafone and Three on this very subject.
According to Three:
Love staying connected? We recommend our Data Passport. It’s just GBP5.00 for unlimited data which you can use for up to 24 hours, as Data Passports are valid until midnight GMT+1 (BST) on the day of purchase …
Significantly, it added:
In order to avoid incurring roaming charges before purchasing a Data Passport, we suggest using a local WiFi connection instead of your roaming data.
Vodafone, meanwhile, welcomed me to Ireland with the news that:
It’s one of our inclusive Zone A destinations - so you can use the calls, texts and up to 25GB of data (including Extras) from your plan here at no extra cost. If your data runs out, it's 0.31p per MB (£3.13 per GB) for any more data you use.
A second message read:
One more quick thing... if you've set a spending limit with Vodafone Spend Manager, relax - it's still working hard to protect you against unexpected charges on your travels. Just like it does at home.
Needless to say I ignored all these messages, which is why I have some sympathy with Matheson (although I did ensure I was on wifi for most of the time I was in Ireland).
His biggest mistake, however, was hoping the taxpayer would pick up the bill.
Ultimately the excess charges were his responsibility so he would have been better advised to accept culpability immediately and take it up with his network provider, as my friend did.
Had he done that he would have had many people’s sympathy, mine included. Instead, his efforts to ‘protect’ his family have made things ten times worse.
Still, if this episode highlights the danger of unexpected roaming charges, he may have done everyone a favour.
There but for the grace of God etc.