[Source]: Techdirt
For decades now, U.S. wireless carriers have sold consumers "unlimited data" plans that actually have all manner of sometimes hidden throttling, caps, download limits, and restrictions. And every few years a regulator comes out with a wrist slap against wireless carriers for misleading consumers, for whatever good it does.
Back in 2007, for example, then NY AG Andrew Cuomo fined Verizon a tiny $150,000 for selling "unlimited" plans that were very limited (Verizon kept doing it anyway). In 2019, the FTC fined AT&T $60 million for selling "unlimited" plans that were very limited, then repeatedly lying to consumers about it (impacted consumers ultimately saw refunds of around $22 each).
It's gotten slightly better, but it's still a problem. Providers still impose all manner of weird restrictions on mobile lines and then bury them in their fine print, something that's likely only to get worse after Trump 2.0 takes an absolute hatchet to whatever's left of regulatory independence and federal consumer protection.
In the interim, telecom providers are even bickering about the definition of "unlimited" between themselves. For example Verizon is mad that Charter Communications (a cable company that got into wireless) is advertising its wireless service as "unlimited," while telling users they can "use all the data you want."
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 10, @03:21PM (4 children)
Enjoy!
I'll suffer with my never-has-been-limited-and-far-cheaper-and-still-fast-and-not-perfect-but-still-quite-good-coverage-plan here in not-USA.
(Score: 4, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 10, @03:27PM (3 children)
Must be Germany, because no other language has words that long.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 10, @03:38PM (1 child)
Unfortunately not true. If it was, by German law, there would have to be one 'und' instead of an 'and'.
(Score: 2) by Tork on Saturday January 11, @05:18AM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 4, Funny) by Tork on Friday January 10, @06:38PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 10, @05:22PM
I work for a UK Mobile operator and contracts here are mostly sold with a big obvious monthly data cap (e.g. "Get the 20GB bundle"). The operators each seem to vie with each other for ever bigger and cheaper packages, 100GB can be found on offer for £30 per month often with some streaming service thrown in Prime/Disney/Netflix etc. You can even combine bundles within your family group so if Mum and Dad use little but instaqueen uses loads then things can be shared out without having to pay more.
On top of this we also offer "Unlimited" contracts which have no monthly cap but do have small print about abuse of the service, i.e. if your data patterns look normal for the average high-end user then you're fine but if you try and use the phone as a download gateway pulling down torrents at top speed 24 hours a day 365 days of the year then yes, you're going to get throttled. And I'm fine with that. "Unlimited" doesn't mean fuck the network for everyone else.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Username on Friday January 10, @05:45PM (5 children)
It's unlimited data not bandwidth. I understand it's a weasle word type of difference, but they are not wrong.
It's like having unlimited sand with free shipping, and they ship it to you one grain a week taped to an ad postcard.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Friday January 10, @06:13PM
Our home cable internet service apparently has a data cap around 2TB per month, which is pretty easy to hit if you stream a 4K webcam for hundreds of hours...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aafcac on Friday January 10, @07:24PM (3 children)
OK, so how do you send the unlimited data without unlimited bandwidth? Most reasonable people would consider unlimited data to mean that you can max out the bandwidth available in a given location for the entire month. That's unlimited. The only limitations are similar to things like unlimited buffets where at some point everybody runs out of room to eat more.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by janrinok on Friday January 10, @07:41PM (2 children)
That is precisely the point. You can send as much data as you wish - but they will dictate the speed at which you can send it. It sounds like you are getting an 'unlimited' deal but, of course, you are not. They cannot meet the promise of unlimited bandwidth so they play with words which the vast majority of customers interpret as being a good deal.
We are probably a fairly small minority who can see the catch in what they promise but we can do nothing. They haven't broken any laws, and we will probably not find a significantly better deal because they all do it.
In Europe now (at least I think it is everywhere but perhaps it is more limited than that) they cannot advertise 'up to x Gbits' because that is also a meaningless phrase. They now have to specify an average that they can guarantee for all users for a high percentage of the time. There will perhaps be events (sporting finals etc) which cause them to struggle but these are considered exceptional circumstances if they are a very small percentage of the time.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.
(Score: 2) by aafcac on Friday January 10, @08:08PM
Yes, although, the issue there would be where the limitations on the bandwidth aren't properly disclosed or are insufficient for use of the service that's being sold. I do agree with you that "up to" language should be outright illegal without a clear indicator of what the lower limit on that is as 0 would be up to.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 11, @03:58AM
I have a cheap mobile plan, AU$20 per month. It has 200MB of data per month, then it is either $10/GB OR throttling. Since I don't stream video or use that much data, and the throttled speed is still 5Mbit, I chose throttling over paying more.
One month when my home internet was out I hotspotted the phone to it and ran 20GB through it in a little over a week. All at a throttled speed that was faster than my first "broadband" line.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Friday January 10, @06:22PM (1 child)
Whenever oligopolies start competing with each other in any capacity whatsoever, that's good for the people stuck buying from them. So I hope they all air each other's dirty laundry as loudly as possible.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday January 10, @09:17PM
I don't know about that. To me it seems they have been competing for who can make their customers the most miserable without getting fined.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Saturday January 11, @02:13AM
I often wonder how much lying and treachery a society can withstand without collapsing, and whether lying is trending downward, about the same as ever, or getting worse. The biggest example of taking the treachery too far would seem to be the Byzantine Empire. Also plenty of lying about pretty much everything in the old Soviet Union.
Now the US is stuck, again, with the biggest liar ever to hold the top office. The US healthcare system is tremendously burdened with extremely complicated (byzantine?) corrupt billing practices. Federal income tax is excessively byzantine, to push citizens into paying for tax prep services. Telecoms were given money to build Internet everywhere, instead they pocketed it. Traffic and parking enforcement has been another area roundly abused to extract revenue from people, ranging from the notoriously overzealous university parking enforcement to speed guns and red light cameras. Obviously the thinking is that if you're rich enough to have a car, you're a payer -- a person who will pay to get out of trouble, rich enough to pony up money for fines of dubious validity rather than fight or hide. We now have a new word, "lawfare", that means abuse of the justice system to harass citizens who have dared to impede the rich and powerful.