With the news that a lawsuit has been filed against T-Mobile for advertising "unlimited" smartphone data service that's really limited to 10GB, it raises an important question: how come we don't see more lawsuits like this? For years we've pointed out that all these services marketing offerings as "unlimited" when they're really limited certainly must be violating truth in advertising laws -- but for some reason, you almost never hear of any actual lawsuits against these companies. Now, it's probably difficult to show that the difference caused much harm, but you would think that, at the very least, the FTC would step in at some point to point out that calling a limited service "unlimited," is not allowed.

We've seen how broadband providers and mobile carriers have regularly been confused by the term unlimited, and now it appears that the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) is going down the same road. To deal with its budget crunch the MTA is planning to say that its unlimited ride cards are actually quite limited. A monthly "unlimited" card will get you 90 rides. A weekly one will get you 21 rides. Basically, "unlimited" means 3 rides per day. As someone who spends a lot of time in NY, and frequently gets unlimited weekly cards, I know I use it more than 21 times in a week, especially when I'm bouncing around from meeting to meeting during a day. The MTA might want to be careful, of course. Companies have been fined for falsely stating unlimited when things are not actually unlimited.

There's lots of buzz going around concerning the news that an AT&T exec has admitted that to deal with the companies own inability to build out a strong cellular network (angering tons of iPhone users), that it's planning to put in place caps and charge more to high-end users. Of course, this is pure bait and switch. The company sold people on an unlimited data plan, failed to invest in its network, and pushed high bandwidth apps on people. And, of course, it's worth noting that while they now want to charge high bandwidth users more, they don't say anything about the low bandwidth users. No one gets a discount. AT&T is making a ton of money off of the iPhone. It could have -- and should have -- invested more of that into network upgrades. Now it's blaming its most loyal users -- the same ones who it recommended high bandwidth apps to -- and expecting that everyone will be happy with that? AT&T may discover that people start looking for other alternatives if they dump the unlimited data offering that they sold people.

And I thought the days of companies claiming "unlimited" data plans when they really were very very limited had died out after Verizon Wireless got fined and started backing away from claiming "unlimited" data for plans that were actually quite limited. However, with Walmart teaming up with TracFone to offer the misleadingly-named "Straight Talk" mobile phone service, some are noticing the return of very limited mobile data offers advertised as "unlimited." As is pointed out in that link, beyond simply being flat-out wrong and more than a bit deceiving, it's pretty ridiculous for a brand called "Straight Talk" to lie in its advertising, and hide the details in the very very fine print.

It's getting rather ridiculous to keep seeing companies offer "unlimited" services, only to later find out that they're not unlimited at all. Yakko Warner points out that this just happened to one guy in Pennsylvania, who along with a friend, tried to beat the world record for most text messages in a month (182,000) by messaging each other back and forth. They figured they were fine, because they each had unlimited text messaging plans, but after one of them sent 140,000 messages, he received a bill for $26,000 and learned that, for T-Mobile, "unlimited" actually means 100,000, and those additional 40,000 messages cost quite a pretty penny. To T-Mobile's credit, the company has agreed to let the charge slide, but it makes you wonder why it has that cap in the first place if it's advertising the service as unlimited (and then ignoring the cap when people pass it). Why not actually remove the limit?

After plenty of complaints (and whispers about potential legal troubles) a lot of US wireless carriers have backed off from calling very, very limited data plans "unlimited." Apparently, the discount wireless provider Cricket wasn't informed that when you say unlimited, you actually are supposed to mean unlimited. lavi d writes in to point us to Cricket's highly publicized "Unlimited" data plan. You see, right there at the top, it even highlights in orange that it's UNLIMITED. It's only after you go through all the fine print and get almost to the bottom that you see this:

Throughput may be limited if use exceeds 5GB per month. Internet browsing does not include: hosted computer applications, continuous web camera or broadcast, automatic data feeds, machine-to-machine connections, peer to peer (P2P) connections or other applications that denigrate network capacity or functionality.

I don't want to be too presumptuous about the definition of "unlimited" but when you say quite clearly that the plan "may be limited," one would have to think that you're outright lying when you call it unlimited. Whatever happened to truth in advertising?

There's a ton of predictable press coverage and reviews of T-Mobile's new G1 phone -- the first commercially available phone that uses Google's Android operating system -- but Broadband Reports has dug through the fine print of the user agreement and noticed something rather interesting. While the marketing materials scream out about a $25 "unlimited" data plan, the fine print notes that if you go over 1Gig per month, the rest of your data traffic that month may be slowed down to a piddling 50kbps. So, before you get that G1 and plan to surf away, recognize that while, unlimited, T-Mobile apparently has no intention of letting you actually surf with any reasonable bandwidth after a certain point.

For the last few years, various connectivity providers sold "unlimited" data plans when the reality was the plans weren't unlimited at all. Many providers are now changing the plans and instituting more clear caps, but it still seems a bit ridiculous to have marketed unlimited data plans and then pulled the rug out from under those who bought exactly what you sold them. Up in Canada, it seems that TELUS is taking it a step further. Not only did it sell people "unlimited" plans that it now regrets, it's exercising some vague language in its contract that allows them to simply cancel the plans of those who had bought into the "unlimited" plan even just a short while ago. The company is forcing users to switch from a $75 unlimited plan to a $65 plan that is limited to just one GB per month, and dumping anyone who won't switch. That would seem to be a pretty strong bait-and-switch claim. Sure, perhaps the telcos oversold these unlimited plans, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be required to live up to what they sold.

Back in 2005, we noted that Verizon Wireless was following the tactics of others in advertising "unlimited" wireless broadband services, while the truth was they were quite limited. As people later worked out, despite the claim of "unlimited," VZW was cutting off anyone who used more than 5 gigs of data per month. That's pretty limited, actually. When confronted about this, the company tried to argue that by "unlimited" it really meant "It's unlimited amounts of data for certain types of data." And they followed it up with this gem: "It's very clear in all the legal materials we put out." Right, see, that's the legal materials -- the stuff you know no one reads. Yet in the marketing materials it's quite clear that you're claiming "unlimited" and that has a pretty clear meaning. After many such complaints, Verizon Wireless finally started to back down from the false claim of "unlimited" earlier this year. Turns out that it wasn't because of any realization that lying to your customers is a bad idea, but because NY State was investigating the practice. NY has now fined Verizon Wirelss $1 million to be given out to customers who had their service unfairly terminated for actually believing that "unlimited" meant "unlimited." Of course, Comcast might want to start paying attention right about now. While lawyers everywhere are rushing to file lawsuits over its decision to jam broadband user accounts, before that happened Comcast was famous for many, many years for being one of the biggest ISPs to lie about offering unlimited service. It's a story that comes up in the press every year or so, and every year Comcast gives its own doublespeak about how it only cuts off the worst "abusers." However, it's still false advertising to claim unlimited service when that's not what you supply -- and it's hardly "abuse" if people are merely doing what you told them they could do.