Bagel Belly Blog

What is this word 'inclusive' that you speak of?

Ah, Orange, how I love thee.

I bet you thought you'd heard the last of Orange, didn't you? Following on from the saga of my incorrect phone bill, I never managed to get out of my 12 month contract. They basically refused to let me go to arbitration and held my phone number hostage, demanding I pay the remaining 8 months' worth of service plan charges before they'd let me migrate to another telco.

I simply haven't had the time to chase this through the courts, so I left it (which is exactly what their business model is, I guess). But this morning, I was amused to read through my latest incorrect invoice from them and see the following entertaining information:

Data Summary
Inclusive megabytes used 46.7721
Additional megabytes used 0.0025
Total megabytes 49.7093

Data charges
Orange network 49.7068 £57.591
Netherlands Orange 0.0025 £0.016

Total £57.61

From the Orange FAQ:

Your Service Plan charges: The amount you pay for your chosen Service Plans.
Inclusive: Minutes, messages or megabytes that are included in your Service Plan.

Right ... so despite almost all the data being 'inclusive', I'm still billed for it. And unless I'm mistaken, there's some distinctly dodgy arithmetic going on there. The total megabytes should be 46.7746, not 49.7093 ... or maybe "additional megabytes" are slightly larger than "inclusive megabytes", in the same way that an unformatted hard disk is bigger than a formatted hard disk?

Something's rotten in the state of Orange. But then we knew that already.

I phoned up Orange just to double-check I wasn't going mad, and was informed by the person at the other end that I've never had a data plan, that I dreamt the 1gb trial data package they put on my account at the start, and that if they recalculated my bill I'd have to pay a lot more than the £57 they'd billed me so far. Ahh, the happy sound of scaring your customers into acceptance.

The good news is that they told me I'm free to move my account away from them in a little over a month. Which is great news indeed, since Orange sucks: they have awful phone reception, broken billing systems, an abusive approach to customer care, and are now firmly ranked as the worst telco I've ever had dealings with (which is saying something, as I've had problems in the past with Vodafone and O2 as well).

I'll probably go back to Vodafone, as they are the only ones with somewhat consistent phone reception in the UK.

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