June 30th, 2005
UK VoIP user fights big telco over "free calls" offer - and wins!
I, like you, have had it to here with fine print nickel-and-diming.
Want to hear a true story of a customer who won?
Our sister site ZDNet UK has an interesting piece about a British user of British Telecom’s BT Communicator VoIP package.
The unnamed user had a Broadband Basic package, which gave him an allowance of 1GB a month. Yet he was also on board with BT Communicator’s "free UK calls for a year" deal.
Only complication: those "free calls" spent the gent from Kent’s 1G broadband allotment to the point where he was only able to obtain slightly more than three hours of free VoIP service each month.
The UK Advertising Standards Authority sided with the subscriber. As ZDNet UK’s Tom Espiner explains and the ATA’s own documentation confirms, the ASA told BT not to describe calls that depleted a consumer’s broadband usage allowance as ‘free’ and to state prominently in (advertising) for BT Communicator that making telephone calls (can deplete) this allowance."
Russell Shaw is an enterprise computing journalist, analyst and author based in Portland, Oregon. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
