What does Unlimited mean?

RadoJo

Presumably this is to stop people using the unlimited texts for spam etc. I am not defending the slight irregularities of the wording, but they have to protect themselves from abuse, and this may be the fairest way to do it - anyone using these texts for the purposes intended (ie personal use) will never manage to run out, and anyone abusing the system will find that they do, and are easily identified. If they really were unlimited, and the system was abused, they would just withdraw the offer, and then nobody would get the free texts!

advent1122

Brooker_Dave wrote: »

There has to be some limit otherwise some bright spark will think of a way of abusing the offer.

The point is the words
UNLIMITED FREE WEEKEND TEXTS
in huge letters and then in tiny text "limited to 3000 texts".


So lets look at it another way.
You hire a car which advertises
UNLIMITED MILEAGE.
Drive 2000 miles in a weekend and take it back. They then charge you £100 because buried in the small print it says "Limited to 1000 miles -10p per mile above this". Do you think the car hire company would be able to win this in court?

mymatebob

advent1122 wrote: »

The point is the words
UNLIMITED FREE WEEKEND TEXTS
in huge letters and then in tiny text "limited to 3000 texts".


So lets look at it another way.
You hire a car which advertises
UNLIMITED MILEAGE.
Drive 2000 miles in a weekend and take it back. They then charge you £100 because buried in the small print it says "Limited to 1000 miles -10p per mile above this". Do you think the car hire company would be able to win this in court?

Have you considered taking it to the ASA?

Might be worth it for some fun

grayme-m

advent1122 wrote: »

The point is the words
UNLIMITED FREE WEEKEND TEXTS
in huge letters and then in tiny text "limited to 3000 texts".


So lets look at it another way.
You hire a car which advertises
UNLIMITED MILEAGE.
Drive 2000 miles in a weekend and take it back. They then charge you £100 because buried in the small print it says "Limited to 1000 miles -10p per mile above this". Do you think the car hire company would be able to win this in court?

I don't see why they can't put:

UNLIMITED FREE WEEKEND TEXTS *
*for personal non-business use only

As has been said before, it's going to be a major ball-ache to break that for the sake of it, and spam would be for business use.
Then surely any other form of abuse (such as maybe 'getting back at someone' by swamping their phone with >3,000 abusive texts) would be taken care of by some other term and condition about not abusing people or similar?

Your analogy with the car is different as it is possible to privately drive over 1,000 miles in a weekend.

uktim29

If it was a car hire company then what if it said "unlimited weekend miles - limited to 3360 miles"

At 70 miles per hour for 48 hours you'd drive 3360 miles. The thing is as I've said when limited to 2 days then it is possible when your limited to speed of driving/amount of texts you can type to actually have a limit without it being reached so being the equivalent of unlimited.

advent1122

grayme-m wrote: »

Your analogy with the car is different as it is possible to privately drive over 1,000 miles in a weekend.

So you are saying it is impossible to send over 3000 texts in a weekend?

You have 300 names in the address book - not unknown with the yoof of today. Only need to CC 10 jokes or other highly important texts and the limit is reached on what is an UNLIMITED service.

grayme-m

advent1122 wrote: »

So you are saying it is impossible to send over 3000 texts in a weekend?

You have 300 names in the address book - not unknown with the yoof of today. Only need to CC 10 jokes or other highly important texts and the limit is reached on what is an UNLIMITED service.

No, I didn't say that, I wrote this:

grayme-m wrote: »

As has been said before, it's going to be a major ball-ache to break that for the sake of it, and spam would be for business use.

It would still be a ball-ache if you had 300 friends numbers.

advent1122

uktim29 wrote: »

If it was a car hire company then what if it said "unlimited weekend miles - limited to 3360 miles"

At 70 miles per hour for 48 hours you'd drive 3360 miles. The thing is as I've said when limited to 2 days then it is possible when your limited to speed of driving/amount of texts you can type to actually have a limit without it being reached so being the equivalent of unlimited.

But I do all my weekend driving on the Autobahn and I am an insomniac.

ohmsoft

Hang on - it's not a ball ache at all, a friend of mine used to run a pub and used his mobile as an unoffical mailing list where he simply typed a message and pressed 'send to all' - in less than a miniute he would send over 1000 texts. So its easily done but appreciate very unlikely for personal use.

I agree that by definition unlimited cannot have a limit (the 'UN' part of the word kind of takes care of that) they should probably have a subject to fair use clause.

grayme-m

ohmsoft wrote: »

Hang on - it's not a ball ache at all, a friend of mine used to run a pub and used his mobile as an unoffical mailing list where he simply typed a message and pressed 'send to all' - in less than a miniute he would send over 1000 texts. So its easily done but appreciate very unlikely for personal use.

I agree that by definition unlimited cannot have a limit (the 'UN' part of the word kind of takes care of that) they should probably have a subject to fair use clause.

Would the fair use clause apply a limit though?