Verizon forced to stop calling limited cell data plans "unlimited"

Glenn Fleishman sez, "Verizon Wireless has settled with the New York State Attorney General over the use of the word 'unlimited' in the marketing for their cell data service, where 'unlimited' meant 5 GB a month, regardless of use.

"The Verizon service, as BoingBoing has noted before, prohibits anything but Web surfing, email, and intranet use, although the revised terms of service indicate downloading legal music is acceptable, while P2P usage is not. The AG's office found that Verizon cut off 13,000 customers nationally over three years for violating its previously not well disclosed limits on unlimited. Verizon no longer calls it unlimited, and stopped cutting people off in April while this complaint was resolved."

(Insert "Neverending Story" Simpsons joke here.) Link (Thanks, Glenn!)

• [Ian70]

  Is this like that unlimited freedom I keep hearing Americans have?

• [Andrew Denny]

  I’m in the UK and I have a roughly similar service from T-Mobile. They are very careful to call it a “3gb/month” service, but I’ve sometimes been over the limit without them saying anything.

  I phoned them up and they say they advertise it as 3gb/month, but don’t really enforce it unless someone shows signs of really abusing the excess -in which case they warn you for the following month. I think that’s a much healthier attitude. Deliver more than you advertise.

• [Cory Doctorow]

  The problem with per-bit pricing is that — unlike per-minute pricing — there is no natural human faculty for determining your bit-use. Quick: how many bits did you download when you loaded this page?

  It’s also not auditable — there’s no way for you to know how many bits you’re drawing without relying on your telco’s total. Since telcos have a long history of bad billing practices, this is an attractive nuisance at best, an invitation to fraud at worst.

  At the end of the day, “bits transferred” is a crummy way to sell Internet service to individuals. We generally have little control over how many bits we download (the 12k html file you download might have 250 400kb images on it) and even less sense of how much we download.

• [Bill Barth]

  Cory: Not to be snide, but Ubuntu can tell you how many bits you’ve downloaded. You have to open a terminal, but I assume you’re up for that. Check out /sbin/ifconfig (you’ll have to know which interface is active and be able to work in deltas, but it’s not impossible).

  All that being said, I agree that selling the internet by the bit is pretty silly given that bandwidth is the actual commodity. Trying to download 4 GiB on one day is much harder on my ISP than spreading that out over the course of a month. Of course, individuals don’t really have good tools for controlling their own bandwidth use either, but my ISP does a pretty good job of capping my bit rate (either by having enough customers that I can’t go over my max or by actually capping it).

• [Brian Damage]

  I had an unpleasant altercation with Rogers’ cable internet service a few years ago. I was a subscriber of their “unlimited” internet service yet received a phone call one day stating I’d been downloading too much per month. When I challenged them about their liberal use of the word “unlimited” in their advertising, they claimed that this referred to my ability to always be connected to the internet.

  “So you’re saying that I’m free to be connected to your service as long as I don’t use it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Isn’t that the very definition of a limit?”

  “No.”

• [johen]

  @ Cory: I would argue per minute pricing is also a poor way to go, given lag, and a different manifestation of wht you just said: you dont know if the page is 12k or 300k in general, but the 300k file takes longer to load.

  Unlimited data plans should be just that: unlimited. Up the cost if need be to keep it that way, but dont futz with per bit or per minute.