Vodafone ticked off for talking too quickly

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 10 Sep 2008 at 08:06

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has upheld a complaint against Vodafone for spouting out the terms and conditions of a mobile broadband offer too quickly.

One bemused listener complained about a Vodafone radio advert that qualified an offer for "unlimited texts, calls, e-mail and mobile internet" with the nowadays obligatory stream of terms and conditions at the end.

The terms stated that the offer was "subject to status, availability and connection to 18-month contract. Unlimited calls to landlines or Vodafone Mobiles only. Fair-use policy, terms and 60-minute call cap applies."

The listener complained that the woman reading the Ts & Cs gabbled them out so quickly that they were "difficult to hear".

In a defence that smacked off 'everyone else is doing it, why shouldn't we?', Vodafone argued that the terms weren't "spoken any more quickly than those in other ads that needed to convey a number of points".

That didn't impress the ASA, which ruled that the verbal equivalent of the small print was "delivered too quickly" and that "the important terms and conditions were not clearly audible and the ad could mislead listeners".

Vodafone's been told not to run the ads again.

T-Mobile off the hook

Meanwhile, fellow mobile network T-Mobile has been cleared off misleading advertising, after BT and a member of the public complained about the terms of its mobile broadband offer.

T-Mobile advertises its £15 per month Web n Walk Plus mobile broadband service as "unlimited". T-Mobile also states, however, that "to ensure a high quality of service for all our customers, a fair-use policy of 3GB (of data both sent and received in the UK) per month applies as well as other restrictions".

BT and the wily consumer complained that the ads were therefore misleading, but the ASA didn't agree.

T-Mobile states that customers who exceed the fair-usage policy "would be told to reduce future usage and, if they exceeded the limit again, their network speed might be reduced for 14 days". Those who still stepped over the line might face a permanent speed reduction or would be encouraged to move to a plan with a greater data cap.

That was enough to satisfy the ASA, who said that "it was industry practice for non-restrictive services to be subject to a fair-use policy and we were satisfied that the policy was both fair and reasonable and clearly stated in the ad."