Juha Saarinen: Telcos annoy with limited unlimited mobile plans

While Spark offers unlimited voice and texts for the Freedom mobile plan, it says the data part of it is "non-stop". Photo / File

After I wrote about the meagre choice of mobile data plans that have caps large enough so you can actually use them, I saw that 2 Degrees had come out with an unlimited plan.

Then Spark followed suit, and I had my hopes up for a few minutes until I read the terms and conditions for both plans, which makes that "unlimited" promise meaningless.

You can't use the 2 Degrees or Spark plans with tethering, or sharing your phone's data connection over a USB cable or Wi-Fi mobile hotspot feature.

Sharing your phone's mobile data connection is the one feature that would lure anyone into paying the eye-watering $129 a month for 2 Degrees' Max or $130 for Spark's Freedom plans, but that's not allowed.

I'm working on my laptop writing this, connecting to the world via the Personal Hotspot feature on my iPhone, and hoping I won't run out of data on my tiny 7.5 gigabyte Vodafone plan.

I've had to postpone the upload of videos and big images I was going to do today as I'm on a mobile data connection - it'd be fantastic to not have to use the data connection with one eye on the meter, and you'd think in 2017 New Zealand telcos would let you do that, but no.

Furthermore, 2 Degrees applies its Fair Use Policy to the Max plan, which means if you try to use an unlimited amount of data on it, you'll get into trouble with the telco.

Spark says there are no "strict data caps" but use more than 22 gigabytes, and they'll slow you down for the rest of the billing period.

Slowed down to ... what speed?

Spark doesn't say, but this is in their terms and conditions for the Freedom plan:

"What this means in practice is while the customer will still be able to browse, they will experience degradation when watching video, streaming or loading images."

Not quite how you'd reasonably expect an unlimited plan to behave, that.

It'll be interesting to see how the mobile hotspot ban is implemented technically for both Spark and 2 Degrees, if it actually disables tethering/hotspots, or if it's done via traffic monitoring.

Please, telcos: confusion as a marketing tool doesn't work. Keep it simple for your customers, and everyone will be happy.

Spark confirmed that customers can't share their mobile data connections currently. The measure's in place "to balance the network experience for our wider customer base", a Spark spox told me.

I get it, being able to use the term "unlimited" is a marketer's dream (and Spark is possibly happy they can recycle the Freedom plan name that first appeared in 2006), but it's simply not true.

Please, telcos: confusion as a marketing tool doesn't work. Keep it simple for your customers, and everyone will be happy - apart from your lawyers who expected to earn fees after the Commerce Commission had a nosebleed and started one of its year-long investigations into the limited unlimited plans.

Update April 10: While Spark offers unlimited voice and texts for the Freedom mobile plan, it says the data part of it is "non-stop".

Spark spokesperson Ellie Cross told me the telco avoided talking about the Freedom plan as being unlimited as that would be more confusing to customers.

Spark is also considering plans that allow tethering and hotspotting, for a limited amount of data, Cross said.

Cross added that Spark was genuinely not in a position to offer a fully unlimited plan due to dwindling profitability.

"While I totally understand the attraction of the idea of NZ telcos being able to supply mobile customers with genuinely unlimited, unconstrained, untethered data, when you consider the cost of moving mobile data across a network that has to span a long, thin, geographically rugged country, serving a relatively limited number of people, right now it's just not possible to make the economics stack up in the same way that it does in other more markets with greater economies of scale," she said.

Unlimited plans from Spark could make an appearance when 4.5G and 5G networks are operational, but Cross said Spark wasn't there yet.