The Malaysian Communications and Multimedia Commission (MCMC) yesterday released a statement to address the recent confusion surrounding unlimited plans that were offered by several telcos. Interesting enough, the regulator has also mentioned Fair Usage Policy (FUP) in the statement.
The statement revealed that MCMC has issued notice to Celcom, Maxis, Tune Talk, and Webe after the regulator deemed that they had failed to meet the advertising standards as stipulated by the General Consumer Code of Practice for The Communications and Multimedia Industry Malaysia which is also known as GCC. Subsequently, MCMC has also ordered all of them to implement correction on their respective promotions.
While these telcos may have been publicly reprimanded, the statement also said there are still plenty of confusing promotions out there based on MCMC’s observations. The regulator pointed out that these promotions didn’t clearly state their terms and conditions including their actual FUP.
Hence, the regulator has advised consumers to fully understand the telco plans or promotions before they sign up for them. If you ask us though, we would say that FUP is a thorny issue among telcos.
Our own observations over the years showed that local telcos are generally quite secretive when it comes to this policy. In fact, telcos have straight out refused to publicly disclose the actual hard cap inside their FUP almost all the time and there was even this particular incident where the telco refused to clarify their FUP even though it was revealed via a leaked document.
Only for the past one or two years that some telcos have begun to state the hard cap behind their consumer offerings. Even then, you usually have to dig deep into the telco’s Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) document as well as Terms and Conditions (TnC) or obtain the information from their customer service personnel.
We couldn’t recall if MCMC had actually touched directly on FUP before, but it is interesting to see that the regulator has referred to the industry-wide practice. However, MCMC should go further by insisting all telcos clearly state the exact figures inside their FUP out in the open.
This is so that consumers can easily make their decisions with all of the necessary information being clearly laid right in front of them with no stone being left unturned. As opposed to being blinded by confusing and big sounding sentences within telco’s TnC documents.
(Source: MCMC.)
