Last month I’ve made a road trip visiting cities of Netherlands, Denmark, Norway and Sweden.
To go to Norway, I took the ferry from Hirtshals, a city at the north part of Denmark. The ferry was scheduled to leave the Danish Harbour about 20:00. Since I was with my car, I had to be at the harbour 40 minutes before to check-in, on time. I was still in the queue to check-in at 19:44.
After the check-in we received tags and lined up to get the cars into the ferry. At 19:06 o’clock I took a selfie infront of the ship with the car. I was 19:42 when we drove in and parked the cars. I also took a photo of the car inside the ferry to remember the deck number etc.
The ferry journey would take about 16 hours, arrival time to Bergen was next day noon.
In the ferry after I found my seat, I considered buying a WiFi voucher but I saw that I still have LTE connection on my phone. So I used the LTE for a while before I went to sleep and in the morning when I woke up I saw that there was no connection anymore so I bought a 3 hours WiFi access.
Yesterday while I was finishing up work, I received an email from my mobile operator Smartmobil.de http://www.smartmobil.de which is one of the many companies belonging to Drillisch GmbH https://www.drillisch-online.de/ in Germany. They are using the infrastructure of O2, Telefonica.
I was expecting to see something like 27,- € because I have a contract called ‘LTE Pro’ with flatrate telephony and SMS, and 6GB data per month. This contract costs me 17,- € since I used almost all my data during the month, I ordered to more ‘DataSnack 1GB’ package each for 4,99 €. Therefore 17 + 10 = 27,-€ was what I was expecting.
I opened up the invoice and was shocked. I really thought at first it was a joke.
1412,- €
I called them then wrote them etc. turned out that the phone somehow connected to the ship? then received GPRS connection which they say comes from the Satellite and downloaded 45 MB of data.
They say 1 megabytes of data costs 30,- €. What on earth, someone needs such an expensive megabyte?? 45MB makes more than 1350,- €.
There was no SMS warning or informing about the connection change and its prices. No call, no email nothing. They just want me to pay the bill.
The details of the invoice shows the data connections as follows:
26.06.19–14:05 internet 198800 KB mit betrag 0 €
26.06.19–19:34 internet 44226 KB mit betrag 1161 € + tax
26.06.19–19:45 internet 22750 KB mit betrag 0 €
26.06.19–20:29 internet 5400 KB mit betrag 0 €
How could it be even possible? In EU there is a data cut off airbag system, if your data connection goes up to a limit of 59,50 € then your data connection is automatically cut. So what is this now? Why on earth in between all those European countries, do I need to pay for a stupid satellite connection. What is this? if this is not robbery?
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