Truckie told to halve calls despite ‘unlimited’ plan
An Auckland truck driver is perplexed and annoyed after a text message from his mobile phone provider saying he needs to cut down on calls, despite paying for “unlimited” calling.
Mike Oliver got a text from 2degrees this month saying he needed to halve the calls he was making.
Otherwise, he risked being shut off from his “unlimited” calling plan under the company’s Fair Use policy.
The truckie uses a hands-free bluetooth headset to call his friends while he’s on the road.
He’s not sure exactly how many minutes he uses, but estimates he chats for about three hours a day.
Oliver has been a 2degrees customer for nearly six years, and has been on the unlimited plan since December last year.
“I do talk to my friends quite a bit in the morning, I call my mates and talk for maybe an hour,” he said.
He hadn’t noticeably increased his calls this month and couldn’t understand why he’d suddenly got the text about a week ago, he said. “I was gobsmacked by it.” Oliver called 2degrees’ customer service centre and was told by two employees that the unlimited calling plan was subject to a Fair Use policy.
“I said, ‘what about me, I have unlimited phone calls and unlimited texts’. She said, ‘no you don’t sir’.”
2degrees, like Vodafone and Spark, has a Fair Use policy which says it has the right to enforce reasonable use of unlimited calling and texting.
“Your use of the services must be fair, reasonable and not excessive, as reasonably determined by us by reference to average and/or estimated typical customer usage of the services,” 2degrees says on its website.
“We will consider your usage to be excessive and unreasonable where it materially exceeds the average and/or estimated use patterns over any day, week or month [or other period of time as determined by us].”
2degrees spokeswoman Lenska Papich said it was common practice for telecommunications companies to apply Fair Use policies to their “unlimited” calling plans in order to manage network performance and offer high-use plans to the majority.
There was a difference between receiving a notification and actually having restrictions applied to an account, she added.
“For all intents and purposes our unlimited calling plans are just that for our customers. However, we are also very clear in our advertising materials that a Fair Use policy applies to manage outlying or excessive usage on these plans.”
The company could not disclose how many minutes Oliver had used for privacy reasons, Papich said.
She could not provide information on what the average number of minutes used was for the unlimited plan because that information was commercially sensitive.
Oliver was called by the company after questions from the Herald and offered a different package, which he was not interested in.
He said calling the plan “unlimited” was misleading if there were restrictions in place in the fine print.
“You’ve got a sign up there, ‘unlimited minutes, unlimited texts’.”
Oliver was locked into a mobile phone buy-back scheme until December this year and would lose money if he left his contract early.
He had called the Commerce Commission which would not investigate because “it appeared there was no significant consumer detriment”, a spokesman said.
But Telecommunications Users Association chief executive Craig Young said: “‘Unlimited’ should be unlimited. Every ‘unlimited’ plan that I have seen comes with some significant constraints.
“There has been some significant work done with the Commerce Commission around making those constraints known upfront.”
Consumer NZ adviser Maggie Edwards advised Oliver to complain to the Telecommunications Dispute Resolution service (TDR).
TDR client director Jennifer Mahony said: “Fair use cases are all about the contract . . . we would look at the terms and conditions . . . as well as what was disclosed to the customer at the time they entered into the contract.”