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Comment by nextparadigms | Hacker News Reader

My problem with this is that they've advertised "UNLIMITED" data and convinced a lot of people to join their network because of it, and now they are saying that's not actually true.

I know they have footnotes in the contract, but isn't it some kind of false advertising? It's not "unlimited", it's more like "a lot", and they get to decide what a lot means.

If you're not going to really give people unlimited data, and you're going to get upset about it when people actually try using it as if it was unlimited, then how about you stop advertising it as such?

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It's illegal to offer unlimited in Australia if it's not by definition, unlimited.

http://www.theage.com.au/business/accc-seeks-unlimited-optus...

http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2011/01/dodo-busted-by-accc-for...

Optus is the second most popular ISP in Australia. Telstra is most popular and even they got slapped for having 'Unlimited' in the past (Now called Liberty plans).

To play devil's advocate: does cutting back on the transfer rate constitute a data limit? Users that hit that 5% threshold aren't blocked from sending and receiving data, they just don't get the same transfer speeds.

Granted, it sucks to see this happen, but if transfer rates aren't also specified in the plan/advertising it's hard to argue that this represents going back on an "unlimited data" promise.

> To play devil's advocate: does cutting back on the transfer rate constitute a data limit?

I would say yes: if you have, say, a 1MB/s line, which you keep constantly saturated, you can transfer (1 month * 1MB/s) = ~2.5TB in that month. Whether you have a data cap or throttling, it translates to such a line getting being able to transfer less than 2.5TB of data per month.

So you're saying absolutely no plan at all can be considered unlimited because with current technology there is some maximum download speed? I guess that's right (and probably not just about current technology: I would think there are theoretical limits to download speeds as well).

No. "Unlimited", to me, means you get the advertised speed every second of the month, no matter the data volume you transfer. As soon as they start slowing you down, it is no longer unlimited.

Taken to the extreme, one could claim "unlimited" service permitting one http connection a day -- open a second connection, and zero bytes go through until midnight.

You'd say "that's absurd; it's not high speed internet. You've effectively limited my speed." They advertise _unlimited_ and _high speed_. If they throttle, then one may have a case depending on the reasonable expectations one might have about how fast (total throughput) a service labeled as "high speed" should be.

(IANAL - this is not legal advice)

No, but I think you can put forward that if the transfer speed is reduced in direct response to your usage, that the "unlimited" portion of the advertising clearly no-longer applies.

True that the transfer rates aren't specifically spelled out, but if I'm advertised the nation's largest 3G network, or something to that tune, then my expectation is unlimited data on that network.

Same with a lot of residential ISPs too. They all advertise internet in terms of download and upload speeds, yet if you used the connection at that speed you'd hit the fine-print data cap in under a day.

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