13 June 2007
As part of its latest crackdown on misleading claims, the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) has accused Orange of breaching advertising rules by falsely using the word "unlimited" to sell its bundled mobile and broadband packages.
The complaint was made by T-Mobile, a rival telecommunications provider, which stated that the wording of the adverts were misleading since it implied the customers could make as many downloads as they wanted each month.
Orange claims that its customers are given access to unlimited downloads but in actual fact subscribers are subject to a fair usage policy which limits the number of downloads, dependent on the network availability.
While this fair usage policy is fairly standard among telecommunications providers, the fact that it was left out of the adverts meant that Orange was guilty of breaching advertising rules.
The ASA commented: "We concluded that, because it did not include a reference to Orange's fair usage policies for both the Talk service and the unlimited downloads, the ad was misleading.
"We told Orange to ensure that they included a reference to their fair usage policy when using an unlimited claim in future."
In response, Orange apologised for the "production error" and said that it had been forced to apply the fair usage policy after it discovered that in March 1.09% had gone beyond the download cap.