Telkom chided for ‘unlimited data’ ad

THE advertising watchdog has made a finding to warm the hearts of consumers who complain about the fine print in mobile data offers.

Telkom Mobile customer Clayton Faulkner complained to the Advertising Standards Authority about the company’s “Completely Unlimited” offer.

It boasted “unlimited data”, but Faulkner told the authority this was misleading as “a subscriber only receives 15GB of data per month before being throttled to an unusable speed of 128 kilobytes per second”.

Telkom Mobile responded that “fair usage policies” were the best way to avoid “widespread abuse”, and its policy made it clear that acceptable usage had a threshold of 15GB a month.

Faulkner should have opted for uncapped DSL data offer if he wanted unlimited data, it said.

In its ruling, the watchdog’s directorate said the advertisement “communicates to the hypothetical reasonable person that there are no limitations to this offering”.

“The directorate accepts that the amount of 15GB could perhaps be perceived as heavy use on a mobile phone.

“However, it cannot ignore the fact that the respondent communicates this offer as comprising ‘unlimited’ data when this is clearly not the case.

“In addition, video-ondemand services like Netflix and ShowMax . . . have started to permeate the South African landscape. These tend to consume data at a much faster rate, meaning that an unaware consumer would likely reach his/her 15GB threshold very easily.”

The ruling said Telkom Mobile had a responsibility to communicate the 15GB limit upfront, “rather than hiding it in its policies and fine print”. It was ordered to scrap the online advert. —