The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) in the UK has upheld mobile companies rights to rip off the British public and con them with false advertising claims. The ASA as good as gave the mobile companies permission to use the word "unlimited" with regard to restricted data limits. This follows in the wake of a national press advert by a company called e2save who promised "unlimited data" on a contract for the BlackBerry 9000 Bold. A member of the public complained to the ASA that the advert was misleading after noticing a footnote at the bottom of the ad stating the data was limited to 250MB per month. Despite the obvious dishonesty on the part of e2save, the ASA has failed to uphold the complaint.

In response to the complaint, e2save cited data from network provider, Orange, that showed the "250MB monthly usage limit was far in excess of the amount of data that an average customer would use". The company claimed 1MB of mobile data would cover "160 WAP pages, 100 short emails, four video clips or three music tracks".

Those figures are utter garbage, yet despite that fact they were enough to satisfy the ASA, who agreed "that the vast majority of customers were unaffected by the data limit, and we therefore concluded that the fair usage policy did not contradict the claim ‘includes unlimited data’"

Allowing broadband companies to advertise "unlimited" deals that have set limits appears to be an ongoing thing with the ASA. Possibly they get secret funding from UK mobile companies? Nothing would surprise me in rip-off Britain.

A survey by uSwitch, conducted in October 2008, found that 86% of people who had signed up for an "unlimited" deal didn’t realise that fair-usage policies and limits applied to their contract.

They seem to think the British public are stupid. – In many cases they could well be right , although it’s rather embarrassing to say so as a British citizen. Nevertheless such blatant dishonesty should be stamped upon straight away.