Fake unlimited gets the smackdown
Apparently the courts in New York agree with me that unlimited plans should either be actually unlimited, or not be called that.
New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced yesterday that his office had beaten a $1 million “agreement” out of Verizon Wireless that will see the carrier compensate 13,000 customers it had summarily disconnected from their “unlimited” plans because they had taken the word to mean what it means.
Meanwhile, the iPhone data plan in France is “unlimited*”, where * means 200MB per month. Why not just call it 200MB?
Oct 26 2007
6:49 pm
Great! It’s really stupid that they even try to pass it off as unlimited. But what if they just call it a monthly plan and don’t say that it’s limited or unlimited — you’d have to read the fine print.
Oct 27 2007
9:59 am
There is no unlimited, except in the trivial case, and most advertising is bullshit. The problem with bandwidth as compared to the real-world-cases is that it’s easier to hit the artificial ceiling than with the easily re-enforced no-limit-limits of physical reality.
I mean, really, can you eat more than $8 of shrimp at an all you can eat shrimp bar? Or drink more than $3 of unlimited coke refills at a restaurant? It just happens that these unlimited ruses have a strong backing by the limits of what we can consume. Bits are a bit harder to throttle in that sense.
Shaw/Telus have the same unlimited, but limited approach. The both apply bandwidth shaping and measurement too all of their home customers, yet some use 1000x more than the average. I know one case, a geek house, who were saturating their connection 24×7, where Telus charged them the overage (which they refused to pay). Nothing can be unlimited.
Really, I see it as a problem of palatable bullshit. I can live with Shaw’s level of BS with their service: it doesn’t affect me. If I had an iPhone, there’s a good chance that the limit would be a PITA, and so the BS would exceed my threshold. I doubt that the money-fueled world of marketing will throttle their own BS without stricter rules, but we would likely be trading one form of it for another: unlimited, for “Oooh, look at us, look at how cool we are … buy our wares.” It’s the same shit in a different pile.
/me doesn’t care, has the BS meters already set on HIGH
Oct 29 2007
12:57 am
Data services have a physical limit too – saturation. Dialup and ISDN always provide unlimited data transfer. If cable providers would allow you to download 300GB a month, then it would be unlimited since that’s as much as you can download at that speed. Alternatively, if the package was clearly 200MB with $1/MB over, then that would be reasonable too – if people didn’t like the limit and overage costs, they could go to a competitor.
Oct 31 2007
3:16 pm
“Unlimited” should reasonably be “The Maximum Amount Of Use That You Can Get From The Product”. If a group of users is using their ‘unlimited’ account in such a way that’s unreasonable, perhaps you need to either switch back to ‘limited’ accounts (but limited to a almost unreachably high value, like Dreamhost does) or restrict some other variable (Unlimited bandwidth at a limited rate with limited RAM & limited CPU, unlimited food for 2 hours, etc..).