Advert authority questions Lebara’s ‘fair usage policy’
The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has banned adverts for mobile operator Lebara after complaints that the company misleadingly promoted ‘unlimited’ minutes and texts.
In the UK the marketing regulator ASA has struggled to prevent broadband and mobile operators abusing ‘unlimited’ terminology in marketing. Its challenge is that key restrictions are often hidden in the small print of a Fair Usage Policy (FUP). The ASA has clamped down on abuses of “unlimited” terminology, notes consumer champion ISP Review, but the process often takes several years and several advertising bans before there is any impact on either consumers or mobile operators.
In this particular case a rival service provider, Vectone, complained that a page on Lebara’s website advertised a 30-day SIM-only plan. Most of the proposed deal alluded to claims of offering “Unlimited UK minutes” and “Unlimited UK texts”. However, in classic marketing double-speak, a ‘Fair usage policy’ (FUP) applied. Under the terms of the FUP, it transpired, Lebara operated a threshold of 200 text messages a day and 3,000 voice minutes a month. In fairness, the operator did apply a higher threshold to the voice minutes, noted ISP Review.
Lebara said it believed it was ‘industry practice’ for unlimited plans to be limited, whereby they would be subject to restrictions detailed in a FUP. Allegedly, it said that such measures were needed to prevent the service from being used for “non-legitimate reasons”, such as commercial purposes, suspected fraud and numbers being used for machine-generated spam calling. However, in a rare victory for the British consumer, the Advertising Standards Authority disagreed.
In the ASA Ruling on Lebara Mobile Ltd, the standards body said that, “consumers were likely to expect that telephony minutes and text services described as unlimited were not limited and therefore had no usage cap.” Furthermore, it said, “consumers would not expect that additional charges would be imposed”.
The ASA banned further promotions and told Lebara “not to describe their telephony minutes and text services as “unlimited” if they applied a cap on usage“. However, ISP Review’s proprietor Mark Jackson was not happy. “The main gripe here is that it took the ASA this long to tackle the issue.”. Mobile operators can get away with these tactic because, “consumers don’t always spot such limits or know they can easily complain to the ASA about them,” said Jackson.