Forum Discussion
Message about charges despite being in EU
My partner's on a cruise round Norway. She's got roaming set up correctly on her iPhone (and is nowhere near her 12Gb EU data limit), but received a Smarty message saying "Oops. It looks like this service isn't covered in your plan, To find out how to use this service, go to https://go.smarty.uk when you have WiFi", and a list of charges, and "You need a Cash Add-on" etc. Why might she be getting this?
Quatermass In my experience, when the ship gets out of range of the mobile land masts, the phone tries to connect to a mobile marine system on the ship. Those systems are not included in EU Roaming and they charge an exorbitant amount for all usage.
If you have wifi onboard, you can make calls via WhatsApp and similar apps if the other party has the same app.
3 Replies
MSF Thanks, I suspected something like that. They have free onboard wifi so I'll get her to use that and keep the phone in airplane mode. Do you think the message was just a warning that to proceed she'd need an add-on? Or was she already being charged?
Quatermass It was purely a warning as she clearly didn’t have any credit to pay for use. However, if she had credit, then the message would be differently worded and she would then have cost of any usage deducted at the quoted price.
Snarty do not operate on credit, so she will not be charged retrospectively-the service is simply denied with the ‘oops’ message
Quatermass In my experience, when the ship gets out of range of the mobile land masts, the phone tries to connect to a mobile marine system on the ship. Those systems are not included in EU Roaming and they charge an exorbitant amount for all usage.
If you have wifi onboard, you can make calls via WhatsApp and similar apps if the other party has the same app.
