ASA Order EE UK to Qualify Fair Usage Terms on Unlimited Mobile Data Plans
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has today ordered mobile operator EE (BT) to ensure that the “unlimited data” (mobile broadband) claims on their website, which apply to various 4G and 5G mobile plans, are directly qualified with the limits expressed in their associated Fair Usage Policy (FUP).
The ASA has long had specific guidelines on the use of “unlimited” claims in broadband and mobile advertising, which tend to apply if any restrictions are then applied to people who are perceived to have used too much (e.g. the customer uses a lot of data and then suffers a more than moderate loss of internet speed). Such restrictions are often set out inside Fair Usage Policies (FUP).
On this front, various mobile operators tend to provide a guideline for how much maximum data usage is allowable, per month, inside the FUPs on related mobile plans. In the case of EE, their FUP has long expressed how they “will consider usage above 600GB/month to be non-personal use and have the right to apply traffic management controls to deprioritise your mobile traffic during busy periods or to move you to a business plan.”
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However, the FUPs around all this might talk tough, but they’re usually fairly soft (flexible) and rarely ever enforced. This is perhaps because actually enforcing them might risk breaching the ASA’s rules, which could in turn prevent them from using “unlimited” terminology on their packages.
EE was recently tested on this point after a complaint prompted the ASA to investigate whether the claim that their data plans were “unlimited” was misleading because, a) an FUP of 600GB per month applied; and b) the ad did not make the FUP restriction sufficiently clear. Interestingly, this also resulted in EE revealing more detail about their approach to enforcement, which mostly only impacts during periods of network congestion (4% of cell sites).
EE’s Position on their 600GB FUP
[EE] confirmed that legitimate users who exceeded the FUP of 600 GB per month would not incur an additional charge, nor would they have their service suspended. They believed the limitations imposed on such users were moderate; on exceeding the limit, their traffic was deprioritised at busy cell sites from the time they exceeded the data threshold until the end of their monthly bill cycle. EE referred to the most recent Ofcom report, which stated that the average fixed line broadband data consumption for a UK household was around 535 GB per month, and average mobile data use was 9.9 GB. EE provided data to show the proportion and number per month of customers impacted by the FUP. They said they considered any use that exceeded 600GB to be non-personal use.
EE explained that the measure applied only to the 4% of cell sites across the UK that were congested, and that even those sites were not busy all the time. They provided data to show the reduction in average throughput speed that a consumer who was subject to the FUP was likely to experience when the cell sites in question were busy. It was a guideline only, because many other factors such as signal strength and levels of congestion would come into play and also because it would vary from site to site. EE pointed out that users were extremely unlikely to notice the speed reduction if they were listening to music, using maps or browsing websites, activities that required only a few hundred kilobits per second. They might, however, experience a slower speed if they downloaded a large file.
Sadly, and somewhat controversially, EE did provide the ASA with a specific figure to show the percentage reduction in average throughput speed a user subject to the FUP might experience at a congested site, but they requested for the ASA to “keep that figure confidential“.
ISPreview disagrees with the above position and thinks consumers have a right to know how their service may be impacted. But the ASA ultimately ruled that “the restrictions imposed were moderate only” and thus did not uphold the first complaint (a). The ASA did, however, uphold the second (b) complaint.
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ASA Ruling Ref: A24-1253564 EE Ltd
The main body of the ad did not state that an FUP applied, and did not feature any signposting within the plan details to indicate that qualifications might apply. We considered that consumers would not necessarily be aware that a provider might apply traffic management to the advertised data plans. The Guidance stated that any provider-imposed limitations, as well as meeting the conditions referenced in Point (1) above, must be clearly explained in the marketing communication. Notwithstanding that users did not incur a charge or suspension, and the restrictions imposed were moderate only, we considered that the existence of the FUP constituted a limitation and should therefore be made clear in the ad.
The terms of the FUP were detailed at the bottom of the webpage within a section entitled “Frequently asked questions”. That section was not visible when viewing the SIM-only plans; it was necessary to navigate further down the webpage. Within that section, the text containing details of the FUP was visible only when the subheading “The legal bit” was expanded.
We considered that consumers would not necessarily scroll further down the page, nor click on “The legal bit” heading in the “Frequently asked questions” section. Consequently, we considered that the existence of the FUP could easily be overlooked because of its placement in an expandable section situated beneath the main body of the ad. Because the ad did not clearly present the qualification to the “unlimited” claim, we concluded that it was misleading.
The ASA has thus effectively banned the existing promotions in their current form (seen by the ASA on 7th April 2025 via EE’s own website) and told EE to ensure that their unlimited claims are “directly qualified with the terms of their Fair Usage Policy“, which is at least an improvement on the transparency front.
The ruling will also have an impact on other mobile operators that often work in the same way as EE, particularly if they aren’t making the terms of their FUP clear (many do not). But of course, it may take further complaints by consumers in order to highlight that to the ASA.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
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Unlimited means unlimited, not unlimited but….. If they think 600GB is fair usage then 600GB is what should be advertised period.
Yup its simple and plain false advertising to any sane person if you have a limit list the limit the word unlimited has a specific meaning
Ah yes the old unlimited chestnut.
Reminds me of the days I was with Pipex way back when. I had 1Mbps, 2Mbps ADSL with them with absolutely no issues. I then upgraded to 8Mbs ADSLMax, and was then told within a few months that I had used too much of my “unlimited” bandwidth and that my contract was to be terminated. I cancelled the direct debit immediately as I wasn’t going to fork out the rest of the 18 month contract and I was ready to fight it in court as it directly contravened their “unlimited” term. They kept ringing my house demanding the rest of the money, but at the time I was at work. I lived at home at the time, and my Dad (who had then retired, but he was *not* the bill payer for broadband) advised them to put it in writing.
They never did.
Two years later they were bought out and that was the end of them. Shame.
Those were the days :). Fair usage and traffic management days. I don’t think it would work this day and age, fixed line broadband anyway.
I used to be with Metronet in the ADSL days, and they had a system where your initial payment per month got you a certain amount of what usage, not sure how many GBs and then you pay for anything extra over that. I liked it, it suited me at the time, I can’t remember going over the initial amount.
Strangely enough, the website is still up and running.
http://www.metronet.co.uk/
Plusnet grabbed hold of it in 2005 and that is when I scarpered, pretty quick, that was before BT took over Plusnet and Plusnet had a bad name. Eventually they closed Metronet.
Anyway, just shows how things have changed in a few years.
Mobile broadband is a different thing, I doubt many people need unlimited data and could save money by going for less.
But yes, they should say what unlimited means.
They still do This rubbish on usa, unlimted as long as you don’t use more then 1200gb a month (conveniently you can pay $20-30 to make it actually unlimited)
T-mobile just traffic shapes you (I would say like giffgaff but use more then 500mb or even less then that in a day it becomes unusable)
All this does is causes confusion.
ASA had it right when they forced the change that unlimited meant unlimited and nothing else.
Now they’ve allowed unlimited but with limits to be allowed as long as it’s made clear.
There’s a question not answered by the article, or by the published ASA judgement: when and where do EE actually use traffic management to adversely affect FUP-exceeders?
There’s a huge difference between “we’ve made the business decision to not build out our network to cover that last 5% of usage – the network can just congest, and we’ll use the FUP to make sure that only a minority of users see congestion effects” and “because of mobility and limits on spectrum we can use, it is physically impossible for us to build out a network that doesn’t congest in some places”.
The former (business decision) gets no sympathy from me; you can spend the money to supply the service you promised. The latter (physical limits) does get sympathy, especially since EE can’t control which UEs are used by customers (and thus can’t force you to upgrade to a UE that supports NR CA as well as LTE, for example).
But this all depends hugely on the details; if the issue is that EE won’t spend the money to fix congestion, that’s not OK. If the issue is that, at the densest physically possible cell layout (noting that property owners won’t necessarily allow EE to go denser), with uncontended backhaul, you’d still be facing slow-downs, I’m OK with the idea that the heaviest users face more of the slowdown than the lightest users, as long as everyone is still getting “usable” data rates.
I’ve never had an issue with ee fair use policies. My record was 1.8TB in a month, with 1TB+ being reasonably common.
In practice, not many have issues with their fair use policy. On paper though, which is what it actually matters when selling unlimited plans that are not actually unlimited, their plans have a 600GB limit and you have no idea if they’ll pull your pants down when you least expect.
They’re also not clear about happens after 600GB. They could easily explain that you lose 5G and your traffic is deprioritized after that limit. Or they could say that they reserve the right to limit your connection to “x”Mbps after that limit. At least you’d know what “unlimited” means when using EE.
As it stands, EE’s unlimited plans actually have a 600GB limit, which is much lower than the unlimited plans of Three or Vodafone (actually unlimited).
All Providers have a traffic shaping in place for abusers (three is around 1000gb over 3 months, vodafone and O2 is around 750gb and ee is 600gb)
you probably find O2 speeds is just slow Because of there Network if you can only get 4g800 band 20 (when I used O2 I wish I could block 800mhz band 20 as you had good Internet for about 30 seconds u til you was traffic shaped to oblivion)
generally you can go past this with nothing happening but if you do it 3 billing cycles you may find you get donkey speeds at peak times
I. Using 3.5TBit over there 5G network with an antenna on the side of my building which they fitted on a residential plan.. I pay for Peak priority network usage and they’ve never had a problem with me. The plans are unlimited they just don’t want you abusing the service and taking away what others should have and EE do a fantastic job no I don’t work for them but they have an amazing network it’s incredibly quick I get well over 1 gigabit during the off-peak part of the day and at peak well it’s less it’s about 580 megabit but still very respectable for 35 pound a month.
It’s funny they argue that more than 600gb must be business use when they’re selling gamepass subscriptions. That alone can get you easily above 600gb per month if you use it enough. Single games can be up to 150gb now if not more in the cases of cod.
All networks should make FUPs clear Three truly unlimited data still find that no network can digest that constant tap-running claim very hard to believe I’m on ID Mobile VMNO yes traffic management polices are there to handle congestion and stop abusers caning the network i think EE and other operators should follow US standards after a certain threshold maybe EE, O2, Vodafone should cap speeds after 600GB like 2Mbps when the billing cycle refreshes no good saying that you’ll move to a business plan EEs not transparent enough on that