UK charity calls for consumer champion for mobile and broadband

Citizens Advice, a UK charity, has called for an independent consumer champion for the mobile and broadband industries to stand up to practices that exploit customers. In a survey it says the majority (71%) of mobile customers in the UK with a SIM-only plan are overpaying for data they don’t use, at a total cost of £800 million per year, and that SIM-only mobile customers could save about £63 per year by switching to a cheaper deal that matched their data consumption. The average amount of data wasted each month was 2 GB. This is equivalent to streaming 3 hours of video or 28 hours of music. Citizens Advice estimates this affects 12 million people in the UK who have a SIM-only contract. While surveying SIM-only clients, it said this likely affects people who have bundled contracts too. People who purchased their contract in store were found to waste 4.2 GB on average, while those who bought online waste 2.6 GB, suggesting sales practices in store could particularly be leading consumers to take out contracts with excessive data allowances. The charity is urging more mobile networks to refund unused data, or make it easier for customers to reduce their monthly allowance if they find they are wasting data repeatedly. Read more

• Tuesday, 19 February 2019