“Unlimited” telephony and internet offers may bear usage restrictions

23.09.2014

The National Authority for Management and Regulation in Communications of Romania warns the users who hold or purchase telephone and Internet services under offers advertised as having “unlimited” benefits that the telecom operators may impose ceilings for the use of the minutes, SMS or data under the offers and, if the users exceed them, the operators could restrict their access to the respective services or claim additional costs.

The users should be aware that the telecom operators’ offers advertised as having “unlimited” benefits often entail restrictions or conditions of use within the purpose of preventing fraud or the abusive use of the voice or data services sold by the providers. The operators have the obligation to include information on the possible applicable restrictions in the contracts concluded with the end-users, in the case of both subscriptions and prepaid cards.

For instance, in order to reduce the risk of fraud, the operators may restrict or interrupt the access to the telephone service for the users who exceed a monthly consumption considered reasonable, referred to in the contracts as thresholds (e.g. monthly calls summing up more than 5,000 minutes). As well, the operators may limit the contractual benefits in the cases where the monthly voice traffic of calls initiated to other networks exceeds significantly the voice traffic of the calls received from other networks, or may reduce the data transfer speeds once a certain amount of data traffic is reached (e.g. 5 GB).

Furthermore, in order to prevent the abusive use, the operators may specify in the contract that the services offered can only be used for the users’ own needs and not for testing equipment, reselling the service to third parties or using automatic systems to send bulk SMS messages, make calls or transfer data in order to gain profit as a result of an economic activity.

In the cases where the users do not observe the contractual conditions, the providers may suspend or restrict the services offered, for example by blocking the initiation of calls until the end of the billing month (except emergency calls), may unilaterally terminate the contracts or may apply penalties to, or ask compensations from, their customers.

ANCOM advises the users to carefully read the contractual conditions when they purchase telephone and Internet services with unlimited benefits in order to avoid such situations caused by the lack of awareness of the restrictions of use. If the users find that the operator from which they bought these services did not inform them in writing about the possible restrictions applicable to the unlimited benefits, they can address ANCOM, here.