>"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.