£1 data charge on pay as you go

[Anonymous]

Ok, I have an O2 sim card for my 10 year old daughter, I want her to be able to send texts and make phone calls when necessary - but cannot find a single tariff that does not charge her £1 per day for data usage which she does not need - so £10 per month suddenly looks like £40 per month? Which is utterly absurd.  Is there a tariff that does not charge this? Or is it a complete waste of time being with PAYG on O2 these days - because if it is, I'm getting a tesco sim card for her.  Really hacked off with this, having lost £5 through this off her initial £10 top up - we are at mo leaving the phone turned off so it can't be taken out.  Can't manage to speak to anyone online as they are far too busy, and of course, being a phone company, there is no phone number to call them on .... I have three contract phones with O2, which are fine, but I don't really want her to have a contract phone ...

[perksie · Accepted solution]

What phone is this as you can turn data off in the settings and get no data charges?

[Anonymous]

It's my old iphone 3 - wasn't worth selling on, so figured she might as well have that when I upgraded - I turned off the wifi, and it still took £1 - is there something else I should turn off?

[MI5]

You can switch to a tariff that includes data for the monthly top up or just turn off data on the phone as advised by perksie.....

[MI5]

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@Anonymous wrote:
It's my old iphone 3 - wasn't worth selling on, so figured she might as well have that when I upgraded - I turned off the wifi, and it still took £1 - is there something else I should turn off?

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Wifi is free, you need to turn off cell (mobile) data.....

[Anonymous]

Be aware that when an iPhones screen goes to sleep it will switch from wifi to 3G.

One way of permanently stopping any data charges is to go into your O2 apn settings in the iPhone and purposely change the settings ,so it cannot connect.

Settings , Settings , Mobile , mobile data network.

The settings are there.

[Anonymous]

Thank you - I'll go into it and have a look   Just seems a complete rip off to take £1 per day whether you are using data or not - would have no problem paying it if she were ...

[perksie]

O2 don't take it unless the phone connects to the internet, which it will all by itself.

This is why we're telling you to turn data off in the phone.

[MI5]

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@Anonymous wrote:

Thank you - I'll go into it and have a look   Just seems a complete rip off to take £1 per day whether you are using data or not - would have no problem paying it if she were ...

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The fact that cell data is on will mean the phone will automatically try and update through that route. You are fine to leave wifi on as long as you have cell data turned off.

[Anonymous]

There has been quite a few discussions on here about the £1 web daily.

Personally I think there should be a pop up warning message advising a person they are about to incur data charges.

With today's smartphones needing to be connected to the data service so things like apps and weather services can update in the background without the user even knowing they are I'm not surprised it's happening.

Nowadays most people with smartphones have some form of data allowance in their allowance bundle so are not affected.

It's typically when someone had moved from a standard phone to a smartphone that issues like this arise due to the nature of how the smartphone operates.