ISPA to members: play fair on fair use Internet providers' trade association ISPA has told its members to stop advertising "unlimited" broadband unless they are explicit and transparent about their fair use policies. Over recent months public calls have grown louder for action against ISPs who hawk "unlimited" services, without monthly download limits or bandwidth …
I thought that the Sale of Goods Act, Trades Descriptions, Unfair Contracts et al were supposed to protect consumers from this sort of rip off.
Why aren't armed squads of jack-booted trading standards officers out there doing what they're paid for and kicking down the doors of these scumbag scammers? Oh, of course, I forgot - they're dealing with the real criminals who'll offer to sell you a non-metric pound of apples.
I don't understand how Ofcom can step back on this issue and allow these claims of 'Unlimited [limited] Internet' to continue. Sure, they have a vague mention of a 'Fair Usage Policy' in the small print. Great.
OfCom need to realise that we aren't talking about big businesses with plenty of money to spend, but end users, usually with low disposable income, tied into 12-month contracts.
IANAL, but surely a contract can't be valid unless all details that would lead to it's termination being stated clearly and unambiguously? Would the FSA happily let banks say 'Yes, we'll lend you this money sir, at 7.5%, but if you upset us (and we cant tell you in what way yet, we'll think of something later), we'll up your interest rate to 25%, or cancel your account and demand immediate repayment'?
It all goes to prove just how incompetent Ofcom and ASA are.
The word "unlimited" cannot by any stretch of the imagination be interpreted to mean anything other than "you can have as much of it as you like" and by failing to come down on these miscreants like a ton of bricks, Ofcom and ASA are announcing to all and sundry that they have no teeth.
Make it clear that "fair use" of an "unlimited" means precisely what it says, namely that the *ISP* is behaving *unfairly* if having said the service is unlimited it then tries to limit it.
Its great that ISPA has stepped in where Ofcom and ASA has failed, but it wouldn't have been necessary if Ofcom and ASA had done their jobs in the first place.
Pipex as mentioned in the article are playing fast and loose with the whole fair use thing.
They offer "Unlimited" broadband but state that it is limited by a fair use cap. That's all fine and I wouldn't have expected otherwise, but you just try and find out what the fair use cap actually IS. Their website is vague, and emails and phone calls to customer service have been answered one of three ways:
1) Check the website it's all down there (it isn't)
2) I don't know
3) We don't think it is worthwhile defining a quantified limit, this is assessed on a case by case basis
So it seems they refer to a fair use policy that they don't actually have. When I decide your use is unfair, then it is.
ISPs have been pulling this "unlimited (but not really)" crap for years now, it started when you could get flat-rate internet calls on dialup, Freeserve & Madasafish were some of the big name early booters of heavy users on "unlimited (but not really)" dialup account packages which were advertised and in some cases called unlimited in the title of the service.
With the surge of on demand video sites like the usual Google/YouTube/MetaCafe, and traditional broadcast companies BBC & Channel 4 now offering high bandwidth video of tv shows it doesn't bode well for those who have signed up to an "unlimited (but not really)" package or are limited to a paltry 2gb/month on connection that can reach speeds of 8 or even 24mbit, especially when they're tied into 12 month ADSL contracts - something that should also be looked at by the ISPA, users sould be able to shop around quickly & conveniently without having to fork out huge cancellation fees on ending 12 month ADSL contracts early because they find they're on an ISP which frankly sucks (*cough*Pipex*cough*).
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Just had my internet "managed" not capped by AOL who say that I am breaking their fair use policy (fair to who?) which means I have the delight of going from an 8Mb link to about a 300k link "during peak hours"(for this read when I am able to use it). No one will give me figures on how I have overused it or what figure it needs to be, to be safe from being "managed" also no warnings are given, it is just applied. I'm now trying to find a business where I can deliberately not tell people the terms and conditions and then tell them they have broken them, but not how or why. Maybe car rental, get people to rent ferrari's, after a week tell them they have broken the "fair use policy" and give them a 23rd hand campervan (or even better sneak up in the night and just replace it!) whilst still charging Ferrari rates. I'll make a fortune and obviously it's legal??
It is really strange that why fair usage policy could exist for such a long time in this modern British society. FUP, AUP (fair usage policy, acceptable usage policy) are both quite subjective and it is all depending on the ISP's own definitions. Under this circumstance, any of the following categories' people could be affected:
Gamers:
Nowadays, Online games client files come up to several GBs size and it is fairly common for people downloading a few games a month. Also, there are increasing amount of retailers start providing direct download service for those PC gamers. This will help them save time to shop around and even money. However, they are really easy to end up with spending 40GB or more for "just downloading the games", how much time you spend on-line play will be another story.
Multimedia entertainments:
As we know, video on-demand services such as Youtube, Google Video and even BBC is coming now. They all cost a significant amount of bandwidth. But, in the customer point of view, should we be restricted for those daily entertainments? Also, this is definitely not a good thing for the development of entertaining industrials.
P2P users:
When people hear about P2P, it always link to the illegal stuff. P2P itself is purely legal as long as you didn't download any illegal content. In fact, P2P is an alternative to help companies reducing the cost of bandwidth and stress to their hosting servers. Some famous companies, such as Blizzard has started to use technology in the their popular MMO "World of Warcraft". Also, for those personal users, it could be really helpful for file transfer. Let's say, you got some big(possibly 1GB) files and would like to share it with your relatives and friends. You could either upload it those free spaces (may not be stable and takes long time) or share it by P2P in one go. Obviously, you will save a lot of time by the later one.
At this stage, ISPs are actually playing around with their own defined usage policy and end users will be easily charged for any reason that their ISP thinks not fair for themselves. Also, as you know most of the FUP/AUP are not well defined what will be fair and what will happen after the user's account being canceled, users are possible to end up with paying the rest of the contract for any reason that ISPs itself think as unfair. In some particular situation, ISPs could use it as a way to force their unwanted customer to leave and this will help them making more money with their unfair and unacceptable usage policy!
As the title says, it doesn't matter what the ASA and OFCOM think, what ISPs are doing has no legal standing. On the contrary, I and I know others have successfully taken their ISP to the small claims court when we've been bottlenecked for breaching unpublished barriers.
Demon Internet imposed a a bandwidth cap a few months ago but refused to publicly state what it was. When I got a letter saying I'd be limited to 128kbps speeds for a full month for imposing a 60gb cap I put in a small claims court challenge online. I claimed for 1 months subscription, sign-up costs to a new ISP, 1 months loss of online gaming subscriptions (XBox live and World of Warcraft), loss of business due to the fact I was unable to realistically perform my web design business on the connection (they say 128kbps, but it's more like dialup 4k/s downloads etc.). Demon settled for a few hundred quid - they know they don't have a case.
I suggest more and more people do this, perhaps when it starts costing the ISPs more to rip us off than they gain from ripping us off they'll start listening.
All that said however, don't be fooled by Plus.Net's supposed transparency either, it is Plus.Net I have moved to since dropping Demon and although they claim (or claimed on the now obsolete package I signed up to) that bandwidth limitations were between 4pm and midnight, they were in fact up until 2am, because P2P was still restricted further between Midnight and 2am.
Essentially, there isn't an ISP out there at the moment that hasn't jumped on the screw the customer, increase the profits bandwagon. It's sad that UK internet access has actually deteriorated over the past few years, we went from metred dialup to unmetred dialup, to unmetred broadband, to capped broadband and some ISPs are rapidly heading towards metred/capped broadband.
There's something very wrong when everyone could only get 512kbps - 2mbps for a few years, completely uncapped, yet suddenly we've all moved to 8mbps and the bandwidth caps are so low it means we can only download 1/20th what we could previously in a month when we were all limited to around 512kbps - this suggests that ISP bandwidth capacity has actually gone down, despite speed going up. The worst part is that some ISPs, like Plus.Net are even throttling us on the speed front too, so not only can't we download as much, we can't even download it as fast as we used to!
Bollocks ! If I buy a contract saying UNLIMITED, then you'd better not have the gall to limit me or I'll come and discuss the matter with a baseball bat and we'll review the definition of the word "unlimited".
I simply do not comprehend how a Trade Practices organization can possibly fail to react to such a blatant violation of contract. ISPs are not an insurance company, for Heaven's sake !
Even in England there must be a notion that a contract is a binding agreement, and I vaguely remember from my (few) hours of legal studies that a proper contract must be entirely clear for each party, with no hidden clauses, else the contract is void.
Why is there no lawyer to step up and take these jokers to court over such an easily identifiable injustice ?
Well the reason no-one can take these ISP's to court is there is always clauses in the small print which say basically if we want to change something we can anytime we please, as well as having the AUP/FUP or whatever stated in there too.....
Just out of interest (I'm not sure exactly what the BT wholesale prices are now but this is as of about a year ago) the 'break even' point for most ISP's that use the BT wholesale service was approx. 50GB per month, use more than this and you would start costing more money than you make (based on around a £24.99 'unlimited' service)....
Well the reason no-one can take these ISP's to court is there is always clauses in the small print which say basically if we want to change something we can anytime we please, as well as having the AUP/FUP or whatever stated in there too.....
Just out of interest (I'm not sure exactly what the BT wholesale prices are now but this is as of about a year ago) the 'break even' point for most ISP's that use the BT wholesale service was approx. 50GB per month, use more than this and you would start costing more money than you make (based on around a £24.99 'unlimited' service)....
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