The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has banned a website advert for UK mobile operator Lebara after a rival provider, Vectone Mobile, complained that the company was “misleadingly“promoting”unlimited” UK minutes and texts on plans that include a Fair Usage Policy (FUP) with thresholds.
The ASA has long warned both broadband and mobile operators about abusing “unlimited” terminology in marketing, such as by hiding key restrictions away in the small print or a Fair Usage Policy (FUP). Such issues used to be very common in the market, but this is one area where the advertising watchdog has been reasonably successful in tackling.
Vectone’s complaint related to a page on Lebara’s website that advertised their 30-day SIM-only plans, most of which included claims of offering “Unlimited UK minutes” and “Unlimited UK texts,” and that a “Fair usage policy” also applied. But under its FUP, Lebara operated a threshold of 200 text messages a day and 3,000 voice minutes a month. Although, in practice they applied a higher threshold to the voice minutes.
Lebara said they believed it was industry practice for “unlimited” plans to be subject to restrictions detailed in a FUP and said that such measures were needed to prevent the service from being used for “non-legitimate reasons” (eg commercial purposes, suspected fraud, and numbers being used for machine-generated spam calling). But the ASA rightly disagreed.
ASA Ruling Ref: A22-1146306 Lebara Mobile Ltd
We considered consumers were likely to expect that telephony minutes and text services described as “unlimited” were not limited and therefore had no usage cap. Furthermore, consumers would not expect that additional charges would be imposed on users of these services once they reached a usage cap.
We understood that Lebara applied a cap on usage, of 3,000 minutes per month and 200 text messages per day, in order to regulate illegitimate use of the unlimited calls and texts. We also understood that in practice the threshold applied to voice minutes was higher. Customers who reached the thresholds were suspended from their service and charged the standard rates for calls and/or texts, respectively. We considered merely exceeding a particular level of usage was not enough to render a user illegitimate.
We noted the ad included text that stated the “unlimited UK texts” service was subject to an FUP. However, it did not state that the “unlimited UK minutes” service was also subject to an FUP. Notwithstanding that, because a cap applied to those services, which we noted that some of Lebara’s legitimate users had exceeded, we did not consider them truly unlimited. Therefore, because Lebara had applied restrictions to “unlimited” services, we concluded that the ad was misleading.
As usual, the ASA banned such promotions and told Lebara “not to describe their telephony minutes and text services as “unlimited” if they applied a cap on usage“. The main gripe here is that it took the ASA this long to tackle the issue, although that’s largely due to the fact that consumers don’t always spot such limits or know they can easily complain to the ASA about them.