When Is Unlimited Quite Limited?

from the truth-in-advertising? dept

Tue, Apr 27th 2004 4:55pm — Mike Masnick

Last year there was a lot of attention to Comcast's "unlimited" cable modem service that had some very real limits, even if Comcast won't tell you what they are. Despite calls for Comcast to change that policy, they've kept at it. It seems that AT&T Wireless is taking a similar approach. Their recently announced Mobile Internet Unlimited PDA Plan actually appears to have some very real limits. The fine print points out that if you use over 100 MB in two consecutive months, they'll shift you to a much more expensive plan. 100 MB is not very much at all, and it's hardly "unlimited." It seems like that's false advertising.

Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.

Techdirt is one of the few remaining truly independent media outlets. We do not have a giant corporation behind us, and we rely heavily on our community to support us, in an age when advertisers are increasingly uninterested in sponsoring small, independent sites — especially a site like ours that is unwilling to pull punches in its reporting and analysis.

While other websites have resorted to paywalls, registration requirements, and increasingly annoying/intrusive advertising, we have always kept Techdirt open and available to anyone. But in order to continue doing so, we need your support. We offer a variety of ways for our readers to support us, from direct donations to special subscriptions and cool merchandise — and every little bit helps. Thank you.

–The Techdirt Team

3 Comments

If you liked this post, you may also be interested in...

Reader Comments

Subscribe: RSS

View by: Time | Thread

Doug, 27 Apr 2004 @ 6:11pm

Unlimited
I think the disconnect here is that ISPs traditionally used the term "unlimited" to mean "no time limits". This would be in contrast to many early pricing plans which were on the order of "20 hours a month, then $3 an hour after that."
Nowadays time-limited access plans are pretty much unheard-of, and ISPs need to catch a clue that consumers are getting the odd notion that the term "unlimited" means "without any limits."
[ link to this | view in chronology ]
- beck, 28 Apr 2004 @ 5:24am
  
  Re: Unlimited
  This chart has a column entitled "Included Megabytes", and shows plans with 1 MB through 50 MB of data per month, and then the "Unlimited" plan. So they are clearly advertising that the monthly megabytes of data are unlimited. You have to follow a trail of footnotes and links to get to the additional fine print that tells the real story.
  [ link to this | view in chronology ]
NOBODY, 28 Apr 2004 @ 8:21am

No Subject Given
Mike,
I would like to know where these supposed comcast limits are. I've been known to download ten gigs at a time during peak hours, and not had any trouble. So I actually called Comcast about this. They said that the only time they will ever turn off a connection or block anything is when people are running FTP servers with warez or something like that. They said "It sounds like you're not getting the whole story here." Their words. Not mine.
[ link to this | view in chronology ]