Broadband advertising - illegal and deceptive? Please help clear it up.

lee634

jammin wrote: »

Not unlimited, there's a 50gb usage allowance.

Not on there 256K bandwidth service, it states its " truly unlimited"
see here

jammin_2

lee634 wrote: »

Not on there 256K bandwidth service, it states its " truly unlimited"
see here

Sorry, I was referring to the £34.99 plan, as per djohn2002uk's post.

djohn2002uk

jammin wrote: »

Sorry, I was referring to the £34.99 plan, as per djohn2002uk's post.

I pressed the thanks by mistake instead of the quote.
They changed from unlimitted last year unknown to me. I'm not on Zen.

zena2105

hhobba wrote: »

Hi there.

Over the past few years, as I am sure you are aware, companies offering broadband internet connections (ISP's) have began to advertise "unlimited" services. These "unlimited" services attract the user by claiming that they can "stay online as long as they want" and enjoy "unlimited numbers of downloads" - some even say "download as much as you like." However, these claims usually come attached with a "fair usage" policy.

One such ISP offering this type of deal is AOL, the company my complaint is regarding.

AOL's fair usage policy states that users cannot make excessive use of the broadband service, such as downloading one large file for 24 hours a day, but re-inforces the advertised claim that "there are no set download limits for users to adhere by." However, having recently been alerted that I, as an AOL customer, am in breach of the usage policy, I find these claims to be totally false.

AOL do not, indeed, have any "set" download limits - instead, I am told that the limit is "floating". A customer rep told me that one month the limit may be 60 gigabytes of data, and the next month 80GB, before the user is placed on the fair usage policy's blacklist. Either way, this is clearly not an unlimited service and their wording of "no set limit" is deceptive indeed.

AOL may try to argue that by downloading such a large amount of data, a customer has breached its policy by "abusing" the service. This is not so. With an average broadband speed of 2 megabits per second, one may download around 220 kilobytes of data every second. Therefore, in order to download AOL's "excessive" limit of 60 gigabytes of data, the user would only have to spend a total of 2.5 hours every day, surfing at full speed for a month, which I am sure no-one could call excessive, especially given the influx of broadband television and streaming video content on the internet today.

And with an 8 megabit connection, at a realistic speed of 700KB/s, this would be just 48 minutes of full speed downloading every day to meet AOL's limit!

Therefore my complaint, in summary, is that ISP's in general (but in my case, AOL) advertise a service as being "unlimited" when it is clearly limited. Their fair usage policy which aims to stop excessive usage also falls short, because (as I have just shown) usage clearly does not have to be excessive to meet their criteria.

I would like to see some kind of review of the way broadband is advertised, particularly the absolute removal of the term "unlimited" in advertising where a fair usage policy, or any other kind of download limit, exists.

Please let me know if anything such as this could be done as I'm sure this issue will act as a kind of trap for consumers who are lulled into thinking they can download as much as they want.

Any suggestions regarding who I can send this complaint to would be helpful.

Thank you.

I know exactly how you feel the same thing is happening to us, we got some letter about floating around the 60gb limit, although they won't state exactly what limit is!! How are you supposed to stay with in the fair usage to keep your speed if they can't define it, I was thinking of going to OFT, with complaint...and before aol was brought by carphone warehouse, how come they could provide us the service we were paying for without limits and restriction for the past 4 years!!!, now suddenly the exchange can't handle it....... aol will tell you anything and nothing to excuse what they do.....