Orange hand me an £800 phone bill

£877.13 to be precise. Yes, I was pretty surprised too! The reason, it turned out, was data costs. I had used over 300Mb of data in a matter of two days.

I often use my phone as a modem for the laptop, either over Bluetooth or via USB. I connect to send and receive e-mail when not near a wireless network, or to use the web. Sometimes I do these things directly on the phone, not using a laptop. Had I accidentally made a rogue call, one of those that last for hours? Had I accidentally streamed an enormous video at peak time?

Well, I got onto Orange and was put through to a supervisor. He assured me my phone was set up for “push” e-mail and was constantly connecting and checking for new mail – I mean constantly. I assured him it wasn’t. He went away to look into it.

Eventually I heard back from him, and it turns out that when connecting using the laptop MSN was logging in, in the background (as I well knew). Even when not using it, if it was logged in for an hour, this would ping the server repeatedly, clocking up such massive data usage.

Now, one would think MSN would need to send only a few bytes to ping the server. I am astounded by the weight of the data it apparently used, but this is the best explanation, well – the only one, I have yet. Orange would not release the GPRS statements to me, but they did retro-actively apply a bundle, effectively waiving this bill.

Anyway, the moral: be extremely careful of MSN usage when on a cellular line unless you have a GPRS bundle to cover it!