Despite A Decade Of Complaints, US Wireless Carriers Continue To Abuse The Word 'Unlimited'

from the that-word,-it-does-not-mean-what-you-think-it-means dept

Way back in 2007, Verizon was forced to strike an agreement with the New York State Attorney General for falsely marketing data plans with very obvious limits as "unlimited." For much of the last fifteen years numerous other wireless carriers, like AT&T, have also had their wrists gently slapped for selling "unlimited" wireless service that was anything but. Despite this, there remains no clear indication that the industry has learned much of anything from the punishment and experience. Most of the companies whose wrists were slapped have, unsurprisingly, simply continued on with the behavior.

The latest case in point is Boost Mobile, a prepaid wireless provider that was shoveled over to Dish Network as part of the controversial T-Mobile Sprint merger. For years the company has been selling prepaid "unlimited" data plans that aren't, by any definition of the word, unlimited. In part because once users hit a bandwidth consumption threshold (aka a "limit"), users find their lines slowed to around 2G speeds (somewhere around 128 kbps) for the remainder of the billing period.

No regulators could be bothered to thwart this behavior, so it fell to the wireless industry's self-regulatory organization, The National Advertising Division (NAD), to dole out the wrist slaps this time. The organization last week told Boost that it should stop advertising its data plans as unlimited, after getting complaints from AT&T -- a company that spent a decade falsely advertising its plans as unlimited:

"AT&T had challenged Boost for its “Unlimited Data, Talk & Text” claims, asserting that the prepaid brand’s 4G LTE data plans are throttled to 2G speeds once a monthly data cap is hit. For the “Talk & Text” portion, NAD sided with Boost, saying the company was able to support its message."

Carriers (including AT&T) have historically tried to claim that a connection is still technically "unlimited" if you slow it to substandard speeds, something regulators and the courts haven't agreed with. NAD didn't much like this explanation either, noting that trying to use modern services on the equivalent of a 1998 IDSN line amounts to the same outcome:

"At 2G speeds, many of today's most commonly used applications such as social-media, e-mail with attachments, web browsing on pages with embedded pictures, videos and ads and music may not work at all or will have such significant delays as to be functionally unavailable because the delays will likely cause the applications to time out,” NAD stated in its decision."

Granted NAD's punishments never really carry much weight. As a self-regulatory organization NAD's function is basically to pre-empt tougher, more comprehensive regulatory action on things like false advertising (which are already pretty rare in telecom). So usually what happens is the organization steps in, doles out a few wrist slaps for ads that have already been running for a year or two, leaving little incentive for real reform in an industry long known for its falsehoods. Which is precisely why we keep reading this same story in the press with little substantive change.

Filed Under: false advertising, unlimited
Companies: at&t, boost mobile