ASA Adjudication on T-Mobile (UK) Ltd

Ad

A national press ad, for T-Mobile, was headed “The best broadband service on the go”. Below, it stated “Never pay more than £15 a month offer ends 31st March. No matter how much you surf, there are no extra costs. Take your online world with you - just plug into your laptop and go. The only service with unlimited* WiFi HotSpots included in your broadband plan”. The asterisk was linked to small-print, which stated “*To ensure a high quality of service for all our customers, a fair use policy of 3GB (of data both sent and received in the UK) per month applies as well as other restrictions, for full details see t-mobile.co.uk/usbfairuse …”.

Issue

BT and a member of the public believed the claims "Never pay more than £15 a month" and "No matter how much you surf there are no extra costs" were misleading because the small-print stated that there was a usage limit and BT understood that customers who went over the limit had to pay to upgrade their price plan.

CAP Code (Edition 11)

Response

T-Mobile said the ad was for their Web n Walk Plus mobile broadband plan, which   was subject to a fair usage policy.  They said the claim "unlimited" was directly asterisked to small-print that stated clearly the existence of their fair-use policy.  They said it was a policy and not a finite allowance which would have meant further costs applied once it had been used up. They believed the fair use policy only excluded atypical users. They explained that, if a customer exceeded the 3GB per month limit, they would be told to reduce future usage and, if they exceeded the limit again, their network speed might be reduced for 14 days.  T-Mobile said if the customer continued to abuse the fair-use policy, their network speed would be slowed down permanently. They said a slowed down customer could request to upgrade their price plan in order to include a larger data allowance, but this accounted for a very small percentage of their customers and they did not force customers to upgrade if they had breached the fair-use policy. They supplied information about the number of customers who had had the slowdown applied as a percentage of total customers who subscribed to the service.  They said, unless a customer requested to be upgraded, the slowdown remained on the customers account. T-Mobile believed the ad was not misleading because customers were not required to pay more than the advertised price, even if they went over the fair use policy limit.

Assessment

Not upheld

The ASA noted the only time a customer would pay more than the advertised £15 a month would be if they asked to be moved to a different plan because they had exceeded the fair-use policy.  We noted it was industry practice for non-restrictive services to be subject to a fair-use policy and we were satisfied that the policy was both fair and reasonable and clearly stated in the ad.  Because customers on the WebnWalk Plus mobile broadband plan were not required to pay more than £15 a month, even if they exceeded the fair-use policy limit, and because we were satisfied that only a very small percentage of customers exceeded the limit specified in the fair use policy, we considered the claim was not misleading.

We investigated CAP Code clauses 3.1 (Substantiation) and 7.1 (Truthfulness).  

Action

No further action necessary.

Adjudication of the ASA Council (Non-broadcast)