There has been a lot of debate over the years regarding unlimited data and exactly what it is and isn’t. Consumers believe it should be just that, unlimited full speed data every month. Where as many carriers force it to be unlimited, but high-speed access limited to a set amount with a heavy throttle after the fact. The battle between the giants and the consumers has been an ongoing one for a number years with very little in the way of answers from the likes of the Federal Trade Commission or other telecom governing agencies. However, the FTC did intervene on AT&T a while back and that case is still in litigation. Now the agency has put the proverbial smack down on at least one more telecom company, TracFone, and fined them $40 million for deceiving customers with “unlimited” plan offerings.
“The issue here is simple: When you promise consumers ‘unlimited,’ that means unlimited,†said Jessica Rich, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, in the statement. “This settlement means that … customers will be able to get money back from the company for services the company promised but didn’t deliver.â€
In this specific case users who hit the ceiling on the “unlimited” plan were not just throttled to a slower, but usually manageable, speed, but rather some say decreases by 60% and sometimes even to 90% of the full speed availability. That’s like taking Cable down to dial-up. The slowdowns varied too. Ranging between 1 – 3GB with full data suspensions happening at 4 – 5GB’s.
The fine will be placed into an account that customers who were affected, anyone who had StraightTalk, Net10, SimpleMobile or Telcel America unlimited plans, prior to January 2015 can claim a refund. To do so you will need to head to http://ftc.gov/prepaidphones. When you follow the links we also see that the court overseeing the cases still need to review the proposed class action settlement and has not yet decided whether or not to approve the settlement. I would imagine the more people who file a claim the better though.
The story does get a little better as the FTC also states that there was no technical reason that TracPhone should have limited the data consumption. It could have been a different story if it was due to network congestion in certain areas. Instead, an internal document from the company stated the policies were created to “reduce the high costs associated” to providing the data in the first place.
Source: FTC Via VentureBeat
