The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority has upheld a complaint about the T-Mobile ‘Full Monty’ mobile phone tariff.
The www.t-mobile.co.uk website claimed the ‘Full Monty’ tariff offered “unlimited internet” for £36 per month. However, a complaint to the ASA questioned the description of ‘unlimited’ because T-Mobile operated a traffic management policy.
In its response, T-Mobile confirmed that it operated a traffic management policy and said it mentioned this in a ‘key facts’ section on the website. The traffic management system was designed to block spam email, slow down peer-to-peer activity for most of the day and would also cap maximum speeds. However, there was no fair-use policy for the amount of data that customers could use.
When upholding the complaint, the ASA said that services described as ‘unlimited’ should not be unduly limited. It considered that blocking spam email was acceptable and noted that T-Mobile didn’t make any references to download or upload speeds, which means its limits of 4Mbit/s for downloads and 1Mbit/s for uploads would not affect customer expectations.
The slowing down of peer-to-peer file sharing for all eighteen hours per day was not felt to be in line with consumer expectations of an ‘unlimited’ mobile data service, which led to the complaint being upheld.
[ASA adjudication]