Hungary's Competition Office (GVH) imposed a fine of HUF 310 million on Magyar Telekom for advertising certain mobile internet package options as unlimited and thus misleading consumers. Furthermore, the watchdog is obliging the operator to provide its customers affected by the infringement with an additional 4 GB of data as compensation.
The GVH launched an investigation at the end of 2020 into Magyar Telekom, in parallel with Vodafone, due to the operator's advertising practices concerning its mobile internet packages. The operator promised unlimited data to consumers when using social media services, specific chat applications, or certain TV or movie applications.
GVH's investigation discovered that in fact, none of the so-called zero-tariff options, advertised with a large emphasis on being unlimited, provided a full exemption from fees as certain functions, such as the voice and video calls in the case of chat applications or the video content in the case of social media browsing, did use up the subscriber's data allowance.
The restrictions applied to popular functions (such as video playback) and were unavoidable in some cases (e.g. automatically playing advertisements) or affected essential components of the services. The voice call options of chat apps (VoIP) were for example used by as much as a third of consumers in the period under investigation, and the share of users of video calling features was also significant. Magyar Telekom typically did not provide information on the restrictions in its advertisements and where such information was provided, it was not made clear which type of traffic is free of charge and which is deducted from the data included in the package.
GVH's decision established that the misleading practice could have had an effect not only on the price-value ratio of the mobile packages in question but may influence the usage habits of consumers as well: if consumers were aware of the restrictions, they would have used the functions of the applications concerned (which they believed to be free of charge) less intensively or would have switched to Wi-Fi more often.
GVH's Competition Council imposed a fine of HUF 310 million on Telekom for the infringement, taking into account the fact that this has been the tenth time in the past 10 years when the operator misled consumers, among others. The authority prohibited the continuation of the practice and obliged the company to implement a package aimed at compensating the consumers, taking it into account as a fine-reducing factor.
Customers who have used since 01 January 2017 and are still using an option advertised as unlimited by Telekom and used up 100 percent of their data provided in the package at least once will receive 4 GB of additional data, which can be used for one month, the value of which is several times higher than the value of the fine reduction. The operator will inform those entitled to receive compensation about the additional data in a text message. Furthermore, Telekom will inform all subscribers using unlimited options about the availability of information on the data traffic limits in question.
