What Does ‘Unlimited’ Mean?

Mobile phone contracts remain an enigma to many people and all of their elitist terminology that exclude some people from understanding exactly what they are getting into. One of these is ‘unlimited’ texts and minutes; what does this mean? Are they unlimited or will you get caught out and end up with pounds and pounds added onto your bill because you’ve gone over the ‘limit’ you didn’t think you had?

Unlimited usually means there is a ‘fair usage policy’ which means there is a limit. With Vodafone this is 3000 minutes and texts but O2 are a little more generous and allow you up to 4000 texts and a whopping 12000 minutes and it’s pretty unlikely that you will exceed that – you would have to send an average of 100 texts a day and use the same number of minutes on phone calls, that’s 1 hour and 40 minutes a day calling people. While this is possible if you are using the mobile phone as part of a business this should be well above average for personal customers. The idea of ‘unlimited’ tariffs is to allow you to relax and not count every text or minute that you use but this can have serious implications if you are too relaxed – ironic isn’t it. Basically this just means that every unlimited contract has a fair usage policy but they advertise it as unlimited because they have worked out on average how many minutes and texts are used by their customers and provided significantly more.

This example of pernickety terminology is just that, an example, one of many. The phone companies have twiddled the definitions so that they can advertise thus but basically unlimited never means unlimited, there will always be a limit because there has to be. Phone companies would lose out on a great deal of profit if they provided a truly unlimited service. The thing to remember is that although you may feel a little like you’re paying for something you’re not using, i.e. essentially that you’re paying for 4000 texts but not using them. However, if you were to pay your company for 1000 texts but use even 1025 (25 more than you’re allowed) each of those texts will be charged at 10p so it will add £2.50 to your bill and this is even higher if it’s minutes that you go over on.

For more information on the tariffs offered by companies such as Tmobile, contact their customer services department and speak to a member of their team.