I understood that "unlimited" meant all you can eat with a biggest pipe we can offer you for the first X Gb, and then we throttle "over the cap" usage for the rest of the billing cycle. Technically, you can keep using it, but at reduced speeds.

Makes sense.

But in a slightly different domain, my broadband provider advertises "Unlimited XMbps broadband" but throttles after 1.5Gb. That's clearly not "Unlimited XMb/s" That's "1.5Gb XMb/s broadband with unlimited 300Kbps broadband". Yeah I know broadband speed is a big grey area, and they have all these getout clauses like service conditions etc etc, but when it comes right down to it the whole thing just feels like a advertising con.

Here in America advertised speed doesn't even have to relate to actual speed. "Unlimited XMb/s" means "You will never get more than XMb/s, and there's a cap, but you'll have to figure out what it is on your own. Don't worry, it's very large."

At what point is this false advertising? I see it more like this:

    Unlimited[1] Internet, at blazing fast Xmbps[2] speeds!

1: Subject to a cap, don't worry it's large[3]

2: We did the math, and it's theoretically possible, but you can get 60% of this speed[5]

3: 'Large' being defined as 'we won't tell you how big it is, or what happens when you go over. Trust us.'

4: Only at 3am when nobody else is on, with a brand new computer, fresh install of Windows, speed determined by loading http://google.com/

5: Subject to interplanetary alignment, some other conditions may apply.[4]

Has anyone tried suing? The figures so blatantly misrepresent the service provided that it seems like a shoe-in for a victory if you got enough people on board for a class-action.

Varying broadband speeds are why UK ISPs have to state 'up to X Mbps', since they can't guarantee the customer they will get the advertised maximum.

Unfortunately, this makes it easier for them get away with the 'unlimited' designation, since they're no longer promising you any particular speed.

Simple, every mention of "unlimited" in their advertisements or contracts will have a footnote saying that it is actually capped by an AUP with a cap on it.

Like the author said, operators and users have a different definition of "unlimited". Problem is, operators put theirs in the contract that their users have signed.

>"every mention of "unlimited" in their advertisements or contracts will have a footnote saying that it is actually capped"

So you are saying it's OK because they correct it in the footnotes?

By that logic they could also offer "500 minutes & 500 texts... Footnote: actually, it's capped at 10".

What I don't understand is how they can advertise with a word with a crystal clear meaning like unlimited and then totally go against that just because they include a footnote that contradicts their main content.

If you are allowed to contradict your self in the footnotes surely there'd be all kinds of strange adverts:

"X petrol provides unlimited mpg....actually just 35mpg" "Y chocolate with zero fat...actually, 98g of fat per 100g" "Z magazine with unlimited pages...really only 10"

I thought advertisements were not allowed to be misleading, and a can't see how claiming unlimited but then capping is not misleading.

There must be some legal precedent or loophole somewhere that permits this "unlimited" fakery or surely they would have been stopped by now.

The regulator for adverts is the Advertising Standards Agency, and several years ago they decided that this sort of thing was OK. A key part of this was because "most" people would never get near the limits.

The judgment is at: http://www.asa.org.uk/ASA-action/Adjudications/2008/9/Vodafo...

Of course the number of people affected was a figure provided by Vodafone, and by getting this adjudication in early Vodafone were able to get the precedent set before higher mobile broadband use was common.

This is exactly the what I was looking for. Thanks.

I disagree with their decision, but at least it's documented and regulated I suppose.

That's very interesting because with increasingly lower limits this argumentation becomes less convincing. I can imagine many people using up their 500MB with their smartphones in the near future, if they don't already.

It's kind of reasonable because nothing in the universe is truly unlimited, so you'd have to be insane to take it at face value and believe it. The actual meaning is "effectively unlimited" — i.e. you're very unlikely to ever bump into the limits — but that's too much of a mouthful for advertising.

It isn't unlimited anyways, because the effective limit is the bandwidth available to your phone.

Still, 500 MB is a joke.

Likely the argument would be that it is industry standard that "unlimited" means "capped at a high level". And that industry standards trump dictionary definitions.

This is not the case for your other examples.

But isn't this only an industry standard because it has gone unchecked? Unlimited literally means without limit. Imposing a limit is the antithesis of unlimited.

Legal or not, it speaks volumes about what that company thinks of it's customers.

I don't know about other territories, but in the UK this has been tested in court for ADSL providers.

The claim there is that you have unlimited access where access is defined by time (unlimited being 24/7/365.25) rather than unlimited bandwidth to use in that unlimited time. To back this up as a valid argument, it was pointed out that back when dial-up was king most providers (even those with only expensive per-minute access plans) had limits on how long you could be connected in one session and in total in a given day (this was to reduce the number of incoming lines and modem devices they needed to provide the service). So in this sense "unlimited" would be better termed "always available" or "always on".

Of course this isn't how they advertise the service, the adverts very distinctly imply (but are very careful never to actually state) that unlimited means bandwidth as they talk on end about downloading and streaming and show the happy people in ad-land watching HD content with reckless abandon.

A grey area still not tested to my knowledge is providers who have changed what the work unlimited means where it previously did explicitly mean unlimited bandwidth (when they were naive enough to think people would not find a use for enough to cause a problem).

One legal recourse t-mobile users may have in this case is if their plan previously explicitly stated a cap or fair-use policy higher than the 500MB. If you plan has gone from 3GB to 0.5MB then you probably have a case for demanding you keep the 3Gb until the end of the contracted period or to have your contract terminated early at no cost to you. Of course your original agreement may have weasel words like "unlimited with fair use policy, _currently_ set as 3GB/month", which would give them a get-out clause.

They typically define "unlimited" as being 24/7 availability.

That is "unlimited usage" implies that you can use their system at anytime 24/7 not that you can use it for an unlimited period of time.