O2 Pay Monthly and Pay As You Go Consumer Fair Usage Policy

If you are a Pay Monthly or Pay As You Go consumer customer, you have certain usage obligations. Generally speaking these obligations require your use of our services to be for private, personal, and legitimate consumer purposes.

The Pay Monthly Mobile Agreement and Tariff Terms can be found here. And your Pay As You Go Service Terms can be found here.

This Fair Usage Policy explains your usage obligations, how to avoid breaching these obligations and what will happen if your usage breaches these obligations and falls outside this Fair Usage Policy.

Your obligations

You must only use our services or SIM cards for private, personal and legitimate consumer purposes. You must not use our services or SIM cards for business purposes.
What to avoid: Making calls or sending SMS messages in relation to the administration of or to promote or market a business, group or organisation or for any non-private or non-personal purpose. For example, sending bulk SMS messages to a customer base or a non-personal or non-private group distribution list or, making an excessive number of calls to a customer base or non-personal or non-private distribution list with the intent of promoting a business or service would constitute use of our services or SIM cards for business purposes, and would fall outside this Fair Usage Policy.

You must only use equipment or SIM Cards for the purposes advertised, described in any user guides, or as instructed by us. You can’t use an O2 SIM card in or connected to any device or hardware other than the device or hardware it is supplied with.
What to avoid: Using equipment or SIM cards other than as intended. For example, using your O2 SIM card in a modem instead of a mobile phone or tablet or using a mobile phone or tablet as a baby monitor would fall outside this Fair Usage Policy.

You must not use, or allow anyone else to use, our services or SIM cards for call forwarding services, concurrent calling, paging services, onward calling services or to contact numbers that pay a revenue share and you can’t resell our services.
What to avoid: Making unusually high volumes of calls, making multiple calls at the same time or making calls to earn financial revenue or any other reward from these calls would constitute use of our services or SIM cards that falls outside this Fair Usage Policy.

You must not use our services or SIM cards to generate artificially inflated traffic or to persistently send automated or unsolicited text messages.
What to avoid: Sending unusually high volumes of SMS messages, sending SMS messages to an unusually large number of recipients or distribution groups or sending any automated or unsolicited SMS messages. Furthermore, sending spam text messages would fall outside this Fair Usage Policy.

You must not establish, install or use a gateway device or SIM box without our prior written consent (including devices tethered via cable, Bluetooth or wifi, to a computer or the internet, when used for making large volumes of calls or sending large volumes of texts). We can withhold our consent for this activity at our absolute discretion.
What to avoid: Using gateway devices or SIM boxes to send automated messages or make automated calls would fall outside this Fair Usage Policy.

You must not use our services of a SIM Card fraudulently, in connection with a criminal offence, in breach of any law or statutory duty, to make a call or send a message or to take pictures or video or send, upload, download, use or re-use any material, which is offensive, abusive, indecent, defamatory, obscene or menacing, a nuisance (including to our staff) or a hoax in breach of any Rights or anyone's privacy or is otherwise unlawful.
What to avoid: Making nuisance phone calls, unlawful file sharing, and sharing, downloading or viewing inappropriate or illegal content are examples of use that would fall outside this Fair Usage Policy.

You may only use our services in our Europe Zone (excluding the UK) for periodic travel, like holidays or short breaks. Your data usage may be limited in our Europe Zone (excluding the UK) at a lower level than your data allowance in the UK if you’re a Pay As You Go customer and, if you’re a Pay Monthly customer and your monthly tariff includes a data allowance of more than 25GB, your data will be limited at 25GB in our Europe Zone. Once you go over these limits you’ll be charged. For more information on these limits and charges please see www.o2.co.uk/help/pay-as-you-go/roaming-in-europe if you are a Pay As You Go customer and https://www.o2.co.uk/help/pay-monthly/roaming-in-europe if you are a Pay Monthly customer. For Pay Monthly customers these charges will apply if you use up your 25GB limit in our Europe Zone until: (i) you use up all of your monthly data allowance; (ii) you return to the UK; or (iii) you reach your next bill cycle, whichever is the earliest.

What to avoid: Using our services for the first time outside of the UK, using a large volume of your allowance (be that text, calls or data) in our Europe Zone (excluding the UK), or using our services and travelling within our Europe Zone (excluding the UK) for prolonged periods which don’t follow reasonable consumer holiday and travel patterns and behaviour. If you use our services outside the UK in our Europe Zone for 63 or more days in any four-month period and you can’t demonstrate prevailing use and / or presence in the UK, this is likely to be deemed to be an unfair use of our services. In such an event we will notify you and then after two weeks charges will apply (the surcharges). For Pay Monthly customers the surcharges are £3.50/GB for data, 3.3p/minute for calls and 1p/text for texts. For Pay As You Go customers you’ll be charged at a rate of £3 per MB until you’ve spent £2 on data usage. At this point, further usage of data for that day will be free subject to a fair usage of 100MB for the day. In the event that you use the full 100MB Web Daily allowance, you can purchase the Web Daily Bolt On for £1 which gives you a further 50MB to use that day. These charges will cease to apply if you can subsequently demonstrate prevailing use and / or presence in the UK. 

You must not use our services in a way which deliberately games or exploits to your advantage the design of our billing or call record systems.
What to avoid: If you are using our services in a particular way which exploits the design of our billing and call record systems we will write to you telling you that you must stop using the service in this way. You must stop doing so.

Remember that the examples above aren’t an exhaustive list of how you could be breaching our Consumer Fair Usage Policy. Other activities which we reasonably believe to be outside of legitimate consumer use may also be subject to the terms in this Fair Usage Policy.

What happens if your usage falls outside this Fair Usage policy?

Calls and texts: If we reasonably suspect you're not behaving within this policy, we reserve the right to impose further charges or disconnect your SIM card or your tariff at any time, having attempted to contact you first, provided that no further charges, other than the Surcharges, will be imposed when using our services in our Europe Zone (excluding the UK) for 63 or more days in any four month period.
Data use: When you use a lot of data, it slows things down for everyone. So to keep things fair, we keep an eye on how much data you, and all our customers, are using. We can use appropriate traffic shaping or throttling measures to protect our network from types of data usage which we think might impact on levels of service for other customers. This may happen at specific times of day and/or in specific locations. We may impose network protection controls which may reduce your speed, remove access to your tariff allowances or Bolt Ons, impose further charges to your account, and/or disconnect your SIM card at any time. Information about traffic shaping and throttling can be found in our KFI (Key Facts Indicator) here. If we reasonably suspect you're not behaving within this policy, we reserve the right to impose further charges or disconnect your SIM card or your tariff at any time, having attempted to contact you first.

Complaints

If you want to complain about our services, contact customer services (details are on your bill or on the "Contact Us" section of our website). If you are still unhappy you can write for an impartial review to: Complaint Review Service, PO Box 302, Dunstable, LU6 9GN. Please include your mobile phone number if you write to us. If we don't resolve your complaint you can contact the Ombudsman Services: Communications. You can find their details at http://www.ombudsman-services.org/communications. They offer a free, independent service, but will only deal with your complaint if it's still unresolved after 8 weeks or there is a deadlock situation. The European Online Dispute Resolution site ec.europa.eu/consumers/odr/ allows consumers to submit disputes relating to online purchases with us. You can check our website for a copy of our Code of Practice on complaints and for our latest information on alternative dispute resolutions. We are here to help. If something goes wrong, we want to put it right. You can find out more about our complaints process in our Customer Complaints Code which can be found at https://www.o2.co.uk/how-to-complain.