I think she should offer to pay the bill with "unlimited* pounds sterling"!!

*subject to fair payment policy (subject to change without notice) to ensure all creditors enjoy a good and fair payment.

I like that concept a lot, Barryjon ;-)

This industry is its own worst enemy. We all deserve to be shot.

I'm off to raise organic potatoes in Dorset.

<sing along> Now oy got a brand new combine 'arvester 'an oyl give yew the key <fade to squelching>

I agree with Mike but then I don't work in the industry! ;o)

How on earth does Vodafone's system allow a customer to run up such a bill without informing them? Something should definitely warn a user after, I dunno, half a grand!

Exactly - don't Voda do credit control? Who supplies £5k of services without checking the client is good for it?

If the 2nd/3rd tier MNO doesn't have real-time billing record exchange in place with VFUK, then no-one knows about the usage until the billing records are exchanged. This can be days or weeks later.

The foreign MNO wants the roaming revenue (normally at wildly inflated prices relevant to local rates), so it's in their interest NOT to immediately flag a large amount of usage. If they did, then the VF system would immediately flag back not to continue.

But the alternative is to disable customer data roaming. Hear those business travelers squeal!

This is a global issue, and less-than-legitimate MNO's (particularly in Africa) make a ton of cash from purchasing contract UK/European handsets, flying them to Africa and making looooooong calls to premium numbers. The GSMA NRTDE (Near-Real Time Data Exchange) program will go a long way to addressing this, and has a deadline of 1 Oct 08 for implementation by GSMA members. Not having NRTDE will seriously affect an MNO's ability to form/sustain roaming agreements, as it will basically signify an intent to defraud, or at the least to do nothing about it.

Problem is, the NRTDE standard calls for a 4hr event reporting time. With per-MB roaming data rates still astronomical and HSPA giving the ability to use MB per second, even with NRTDE in place that lawyer in France would still have clocked up a massive bill.

At €1/MB, 4hrs of streaming/download at a reasonable 500k/sec would mean a bill of £7,200 racked up before the NRTDE system kicked in - assuming it worked perfectly.

So this problem ain't going away any time soon. In fact, it's gonna get a lot worse as devices and networks become much better at throwing bits about.

One solution? Some sort of 'Data Nanny', that resides on the user's device and knows your tariff, network roaming agreements (could be from a central DB, updated daily as agreements change), and can be configured so that you can't get yourself into strife without knowing.

/m

Mike, That's really interesting stuff. Wow...

I wonder how MacRoam and Sim4Travel-type services (i.e. the prepay) manage this type of stuff from a calls perspective.

Might be an article in it...?