Above: TSTT VP of Mobile Services, Chevon Wilson. Photo courtesy TSTT.
“Unlimited means unlimited” says TSTT’s Vice President of Mobile Services Chevon Wilson as he clarified the Fair Use Policy for the company’s recently introduced “Bmobile Unlimited” plans for mobile and residential customers.
“Although there has been very good take-up of the service, our initial communication generated some uncertainty with several persons expressing concerns about having a ‘cap’ on data and being disconnected if their usage surpassed the cap. There is no cap, access is unlimited, and we have updated the policy to more clearly explain this.”
Wilson noted that all service providers worldwide, offering unlimited plans, have Fair Use policies designed to help them manage their service quality. “They seek to protect against the odd users, data hogs as the industry refers to them, who will try to abuse the networks to the detriment of other users. As a result, they have usage indicators which they use to flag when a potential abuse of the service is emerging.”
It is like driving on a highway. It is available for anyone to drive all the time but there are speed limits and guidelines put in place, like no driving in-between lanes or on the shoulder, for everyone’s safety and benefit. Therefore, our Fair Use indicators, which are not caps, were put in place to spot user behaviour that could potentially lead to the detriment of the other 99% of persons using the network.”
“The perception became that anyone would lose service if their use reached this threshold. That was not the case. The volume of data used is not the trigger for losing service, rather, violations of the key terms of the policy is what we look for.”
Wilson said the reference to a cap is now gone but TSTT is still maintaining usage indicators which will be purely to help the company identify violations of the Fair Use Policy. “It is only if the Fair Use Policy is being violated by a customer, do we intervene. We want to ensure that 1% of users do not negatively impact the other 99%.”
He went on to outline the key areas that would be considered violations of the policy noting, “The Fair Use Policy is for an individual customer making private use of the service on a single device and they are not exploiting this for commercial benefit, for re-sale or making extra-ordinary and prolonged continuous use of the service.”
“Customers should not use their device as a hotspot for other devices or connect it to a home or office network.” Wilson says that as long as the customers are not breaching the key provisions of the Fair Use Policy, they will have access to their Unlimited service.
