Vodafone let off the hook by ASA ruling

Vodafone have recently attracted a number of complaints over a recent promotional poster campaign that ran with the tagline; “Don’t get left in the dark. Unlimited Facebook on Vodafone. Make the most of now.” The ad, which also appeared in print, also states, in a noticeably smaller font size, that the service comes with a 500MB monthly data allowance, and that an FUP was in place.

Customers complained to the Advertising Standards Agency on the grounds that the advert was contradictory and misleading, but a report this week shows that the complaints have not been upheld.

“We noted the information provided by Vodafone demonstrated that only a very small proportion of their customers had exceeded the fair-use policy limited and that action was likely to be a request to moderate their usage in the first instance,” said ASA on their website. “We acknowledged that the vast majority of customers used only a small amount of the available allowance and concluded that the existence of a fair-use policy did not contradict the claim ‘unlimited mobile internet’.”

The official standpoint on what constitutes ‘unlimited’ is a little unhelpful; an ASA spokesperson was quoted telling PC Pro last Wednesday that: “[the] way it works at the moment is that it is unlimited for the majority of users. It’s only a tiny minority of users that would receive a warning. We think that while it’s a tiny minority it’s okay.”

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