€7 per month offer leads to €600 broadband bill
A LIMERICK woman who unknowingly ran up a €600 bill watching movies, has warned other film fans to “read the small print”. And to add insult to injury, Karen Foley learned after incurring the huge charge that she could have had the same service for just €35. Karen contacted the Limerick Post after learning that her Meteor broadband bill notched up the massive charges as she had exceeded capacity.
“I joined the Netflix service, which advertises all the tv and movies you want for just €7 a month.
“What I didn’t realise, and a lot of people don’t, is that Netflix is only a kind of library where you select movies. I didn’t know that there was a charge for downloading after that. I only realised there was a problem when I went on-line to check my Meteor bill and saw the €600 in charges,” said Karen.
Karen said she realised that the charges are not imposed by Netflix, “but they could do more to make it clear that people may have to pay to download”.
What Karen did have a major problem with was the fact that Meteor did not alert her when the unusually high bill started to show.
“They can contact me to remind me if my bill is overdue so why don’t Meteor have procedures in place to notify customers if they exceed their broadband limit?”.
When she contacted the phone company, Karen was told that she could have had a package which would have allowed her to download all the movies she had chosen and more for €35 a month.
“I had thought that they would have allowed me to sign up to that retrospectively as I’ve been a bill pay customer for years, but no”.
A spokeswoman for Meteor said that there is “no partnership between Meteor and Netflix”.
The spokeswoman told the Limerick Post that the company will contact Karen to see what plan she had signed up to and to establish why she had not received an alert about exceeding her limit.
“We don’t discuss individual customers’ accounts but there is an opt-out of receiving alerts system.
“It is true that people can incur extra charges if they exceed the limit of the broadband package which they have signed up for and they are told that when they are deciding on a package”.
