Help!PAYand GO keep losing money!

[Anonymous]

Hi There
I got a odd problem on my iphone 3G.
I'm using o2 pay as u go sim card. Recently I top up 10 pound and when I waked up next day morning without using the phone after I top up ,my balance is change to 8 pound!
Then this morning I checked the balance it's about 8 pound (not change I think) and I made a quick phone call (about less than a minute and my friend is using lebara sim card), after I finished the work at 5:30 my balance is 0!!!! What?
I just tried change my Cellular Data Network setting from payandgo.o2.co.uk to idata.o2.co.uk and the balance is about 4 pound.
Please anyone have this kind of problem before?
TA

[Anonymous]

You will have to contact O2 to find out what is using your allowance. As you don't mention one I guess you don't have a data allowance, which means you are being charged for the data the phone uses.

[adamtemp64]

Sounds like data at £3.00 a mb with no data bolton.

You should only use the payg apn settings.

If you do not want high charges you need a data bolton have you just finished the 12 months free and canceld the £10.00 bolton?

You could swap to txt and web and top up £15 a month to get unlimited data (500mb fair use cap)

The more info you give the more we can help

[Anonymous]

Thanks very much, "adamtemp64" and "prking"
I don’t know anything about the "data bolton" and "allowance". :robotsurprised:
I bought a new O2 sim card about 2 months ago.
I top up 3 times, first 2 times 10 pound and 15 pound, no problem at all. But I found my Iphone can find 3G signal but can not use it.
So I searched problem online and I found I need change my "Cellular Data Network" setting from idata.o2.co.uk to payandgo.o2.co.uk. ,because I switch to use pay & go sim card .Then 3G worked for 2 or 3 web page and 4 pound credit run out . My iphone keep pop the WAP message “you need at least 17p calltime credit to access your mobile internet service.

[Anonymous]

IPhones consume a lot of data, if you haven't got a data bolt-on or free allowance then you will be paying £3 per megabyte. You can see that your credit will disappear very quickly.

[Anonymous]

It's not just iPhones.
Any handset which has a facility to fetch data like e-mails or has automatic updates from websites such as Facebook will find they have the same problem.
The credit has not dissappeared, only gone into a reserve similar to when you pay for something with a debit card and the bank put the funds to one side before authorising the payment. If the payment does not go through it goes back into your account after a while. The same will be happening to your credit.
If your phone has these automatic updates turned on then your balance is going to fluctuate as much as £6 or £7 as your phone requests the updates. If you have a data allowance like web & wifi then this should not be happening as some of your allowance should be reserved instead of your credit. The automatic updates prevent the reserve from timing out and putting the credit back where you can see it.
As a temporary measure you can turn off any automatic updates and push messages (refer to your user guide for the menu path) but the credit will still reserve when you go to update manually.

[Anonymous]

Grawly, where did you here about this reserve you talk about? I've never heard of it or experienced it? Why would O2 not charge for the data used when you read your email?

[Anonymous]

lets just say I'm in the know.
O2 have had to make some minor changes with the way the billing system works due to the large amount of data users now on the network.
This 'reserve fund' has been there a while, you just never noticed it until now.

[jonsie]

So what are you saying, if the OP switches off updates and push, then the credit will appear back on the phone? I have also never heard of this Grawly. Do you have a source for this information?

[Anonymous]

The issue is with the billing system and the way it works to reserve funds for transactions. There is a timeout on the reserve which puts the funds back into credit (at the moment it's about a 15 minute delay). The automatic updates prevent the timeout so it looks as if the credit has dissappeared. Turning off the updates and push simply allow the timeout to timeout but it will still throw funds into reserve when updates are done manually.

Pay & Go are looking to improve the situation but much of it is due to the number of high end phones taking up data connections. O2 made a change to keep the capability for you to keep making new connections and resulted in a lot of confused customers. Hopefully it won't be too long before more adjustments are done to balance things out a bit between network capacity and customer experience.