[chaslam]

Well today I had a customer come into store about their T-Mobile dongle they had purchased with the discounted laptop deal. He took it on the £25 a month deal in which you get Unlimited (thats how T-Mobile have told us to advertise it as, with the * and FUP in small print) for 24 months. He was very angry, almost shouting at me (It wasnt me how sold it to me in the first place, infact wasnt even my store, but there you go). He was angry at the fact that he had brought the T-Mobile deal as it was advertised as unlimited, but he had a letter through the door saying that they were restricting his service to 64kbps as he had ignored previous warnings about going over.

After he had finished shouting at me I asked to look this letter he pulled out his pocket, expecting to see "You used 1.5Gb over your allowance" or some small amount.
As I started reading it, it basically explained that they had sent him a warning letter to which he ignored, and now they were taking action. His allowance was 3GB FUP, and it actual used was 21GB! I was Shocked! when I asked what he was using it for he told me (in his broken english, they barely spoke english) that he used it for downloading films! 3GB and 21GB was a huge gap, and then, after reading the whole thing through, it turned out they were only restricting it for 14 days!

Now, I thought that was very generous of T-Mobile to be honest, because after using 21GB when your only supposed to use 3GB and only suspending it for 14 days is quite good. After I had told him that had he gone with three (who work out over £100 a GB after usage) he would be getting a £1000 bill through rather then a £25 one from T-Mobile.

Now here is my question. Do you guys think its fair that T-Mobile should advertise it as Unlimited? I know none of us do, but I personally think that the above situation I encountered was very generous of them, and they should be a role model to people like 3 who charge a whooping 10p per mb after allowance!

[miffed]

From the Oxford dictionary


unlimited
• adjective not limited or restricted; infinite.

Note no mention of "amount that vendor sees as fair"

Not just T-mobile , but a whole bunch of people need to be kicked into touch over this !
Whats wrong with selling a 3GB bundle as 3GB ?

[getti]

problem is every network say something different. T-Mobile were good not to charge anything so in effect it was unlimited for the price they paid but that is why a fair use policy comes in. 3GB is fair for a lot of people, 21GB is just taking the piss.

Vodafone's unlimited yet only 500mb is a strong point for me over on their eForums

[Hands0n]

I am 1,000% with Miffed on this one. The continued corruption of the English language is inexcusable. If we are not to use the correct terms then we are going into a future where we will all have to speak and write English as if it were a legal contract.

The word Unlimited means very simply that, something that is without limit. You cannot then introduce limits whether or not you couch the concept with expressions such as "Fair Use Policy" which completely nullifies the word, concept and meaning of the word Unlimited.

I am staggered that OFCOM have allowed the incorrect, and in my opinion illegal, use of the word Unlimited to sell mobile broadband and text services which in truth have very definite limits imposed.

Was T-Mobile being uberfair to their customer? Well yes, indeed they were. The T-Mobile contract is very clear that their service is a 3GB one, that they will notify the customer when they go over, and that in exceptional circumstances they will take action.

The customer in this story has been completely unreasonable on a number of fronts.

They chose to ignore the fact that the service they have bought was a 3GB one
They ignored the previous letters from T-Mobile
They appear to have completely missed the point of the final letter


That their English reading and comprehension was not very good is no excuse whatsoever. Try that same trick in a foreign country and you'll get short shrift. If they cannot understand the contract they need to get themselves an interpreter in exactly the same way you would have to in another land.

I have zero sympathy for the customer in this story, they were pulling a fast one and got caught out [finally].

[Ben]

T-Mobile's offering is very generous, and they should be commended for offering a 'fair' broadband package.

Unlimited it is not.

[maxspank]

We should start our own campaignto get the word 'unlimited' removed from these deals. I think they are used because the networks know that most (or at least a lot of) people don't read the small print for these deals. It's surely false advertising to use the word 'unlimited' if it's not what they are selling. If Opel Fruits had to change their name to Starburst because they contained no fruit then the networks should be made to drop the word Unlimited.

[Ben]

You know, we really should...

[miffed]

It does beggar belief that we'd even have to

Compare this to the situation with the iPhone ad !, the "powers that be" are happy to rule their advert as 'misleading' because it shows pages loading slightly faster - yet here we have a virtually all ISP's advertising stuff as "unlimited" when it blatanly isn't , TBH I do not even believe the FUP's represent "Fair" use any more - I am not up on how various download speeds add up / work , But I suspect you could download 3GB worth of data in few hours these days if you tried - Is it REALLY "fair use" to suggest that 3GB is a "fair" figure for a months worth of use ?

If it wasn't so annoying it'd be funny !

[Hands0n]

It gets worse - that 3GB is not a download limit, it is a bi-directional limit. That is, once you hit 3GB of combined download and upload that's it, you're done for the month.

What is very clear is that 3GB is a misleading figure because of the way the mobile network operators account for the data usage. When considered as an overall bi-directional count it is nowhere near as much as you might think! Almost as misleading or confusing as the expression "Unlimited".

But then we cannot expect our expert regulators OFCOM to understand at this level, and clearly they show that they can live up to this expectation.

The science bit
As everyone knows [??], the TCP/IP protocols require an upload amount of data when downloading, data does not simply stream in one direction, and that will be things like response and retry packets of data. These are much smaller than the upto 1500 byte MTU that a downloaded packet can be, but nevertheless the returning packet is going to be of some size that eats into the 3GB limit.

The packets are known as "datagrams" - each has a TCP or UDP header which can be 20 or 24 bytes in size, that is in addition to the actual data, or payload, itself which can be anything up to 65515 bytes - making a total overall datagram size of 65535. There are other bytes of data contained in the transmission protocol down to the network interface layer that all add to the bytes used out of the 3GB allocation (depending on how the network operator accounts for usage) - a good diagram here here http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/fullimage.php?image=6737

There is an excellent short article explaining much of this in greater detail here http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/433/1 for those that want to know the bits and bytes of Internet data working.

If you're interested in TCP/IP at the protocol level there is an interesting state diagram of a session initiation and data transfer here http://www.eventhelix.com/Realtimemantra/Networking/Tcp.pdf

Details of the other protocols in TCP/IP can be found here http://www.eventhelix.com/Realtimemantra/Networking/#TCP_-_Transmission_Control_Protocol

[Ben]

Once they reopen, I think we need to start one of these: http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/

There are two already on the subject, but they haven't been very successful and they're badly worded/thought out (IMHO). We need something that speaks specifically in an advertising/promotional context, whereby we're asking the PM to effect a clampdown on the false claims by the ASA/Trading Standards/Etc.

We could do it and I'll advertise it in MOBILE/Fone/What Mobile.

[Hands0n]

What an excellent idea :thumbsup:

[3g-g]

we're the clear speaking, clear thinking, completely unbiased consumer champions! go talk3g!

[The Mullet of G]

The Gadget Show is already running a similar campaign, they have prewritten letters and the like on their website that you can print off and send to your ISP, so they've done most of the leg work for us. Chances are they will get a pretty decent response so be as well just jumping on board with them. :D


I agree though unlimited should mean unlimited. But I do think T Mobile were pretty generous about it. Downloading 21GB when you have a 3GB cap is taking the piss. Although I wont criticise anyones downloading habits, being as I've already shifted 16GB today and its only dinner time lol. :)