When Jio announced “truly unlimited” fixed broadband, many naive people, including myself, quickly assumed that words had meaning, that telecom operators respected the basic reality of language, and that this would be important to competition in the field. broadband industry. On the other hand, the devil is always in small print. Both Airtel and Jio, in their respective terms and conditions, say that these “unlimited” high-speed plans actually have a data limit of 3.3 terabytes. Gizbot was one of the publications that first spotted this discrepancy.
So essentially, both companies are misleading customers with their plans by inaccurately stating that they are ‘unlimited’ and by hiding in their company literature what they call a ‘business use’ limit. So it turns out that instead of challenging the competition, Jio was just keeping up with her; Airtel has had the 3.3TB cap for a while, even when it released a press release this weekend touting its “unlimited” plans.
FUPs are disappearing in the fine print
This is not new in the fixed broadband industry; Fair Use Policies, or FUPs, have been in place for a long time to slow down data after customers use a certain amount of data. This age-old practice is essentially a data cap, but instead of ending internet access, ISPs slow it down afterward. What’s new here is that Jio and Airtel, two of the country’s largest telecommunications companies, seem to have determined that it is no longer necessary to communicate this limit. Even in the US, whose fixed line broadband industry is among the least competitive in the world, ISPs like Comcast have a full page dedicated to informing consumers about a 1.2 terabyte data limit they have on some places.
Jio, by the way, does Please communicate this data limit, but only for “Titanium” users who pay more for gigabit Internet. Those users get 6,600GB instead of 3,300GB. Plus, they get the basic courtesy of knowing what they’re paying for. This has the somewhat fun result of Jio’s “unlimited” plan which costs less than half of their Titanium plan with an open cap, with only a streaming subscription value difference of Rs 150:
Source: Jio
Jio also moved its clause on the 3.3TB data limit from the top of its terms and conditions page for Jio Fiber to the bottom, where users are less likely to detect it.
Our opinion: You could argue that 3.3 TB is enough for most people. On the other hand, that’s not really the point: “sufficient” does not mean “unlimited.” YOU Broadband, owned by Vodafone, has data limits around 4TB, but these are clearly communicated on its website, and the company does not hide (for the moment) behind legal gray areas to make false marketing claims. Even if we accept this argument that this amount of data is sufficient, consider that an hour of video on streaming services consumes much more data than it used to. In a family with multiple 1080p or 4k-enabled devices, services like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video would suck up hundreds of gigabytes of users’ data allotments for a month.
Renaming and hiding data limits like this is a dangerous development, as other ISPs can do the same to attract customers.
In a billing cycle in which a user receives an unexpected restore of their hard drive backup, a few days of perfectly reasonable home data usage turns into “business use” that slows down their connection. And a customer who paid for “unlimited” internet can be left scratching his head wondering what exactly that word was supposed to mean.
We have reached out to Jio and Airtel for comment, and will update our post with your responses if we receive them. We have also contacted the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of India for their views on such marketing.
