Apologies for the (temporary) Loss of Service

For a number of reasons not all of which I can detail here I wont be posting to this blog at the very least until the end of December.

One major reason has been a return of RSI/CTS making an essential typing only ban come in to effect (I’d like the essential typing to be this blog actually but the day job gets in the way of that)

In reality I probably wont know in what form this blog may or may not continue until early next year so enjoy Xmas and have a great New Year if you do happen to read this 🙂

Fair Use Definition

One of the best definitions of Fair Use I’ve seen, seems like 3 are getting a lot of things right in their attitude towards the X-Series offer

Fair users will be happy

Welcome to the second of our Suits 2.0 posts. Frank Sixt, Group Finance Director, of Hutchison is back again, this time providing a little more clarity on the philosophy behind the X-Series Fair Use policy.

A few weeks have now passed since we announced the X-Series from 3, and a full week since we launched in the UK. So far the response has been overwhelmingly positive for which I really thank you all. Still, some people have been seeing ghosts in the wording of our Fair Use thresholds in our UK offer. So at the risk of sounding like a broken record, let me go over this area one more time.

First of all, it’s fair use, not a cap or a limit. The X-Series is about moving away from the old world of charging per byte, per minute, per message, and entering a new world where it’s free when you use it once you have paid your monthly access fee.

The Fair Use policy is really just about protecting ourselves from the crooks who might seriously abuse what we are offering to the detriment of those using X-Series services fairly.

So what does this mean?

Well, one of my colleagues suggested the best way to describe it is by using an analogy of visiting a friend’s house for dinner. They say to you: “Would you like a drink?” and they point to the drinks cabinet and say, “Help yourself, have whatever drinks you want.”

They mean it – have whatever drinks you want, and as many as you want.

However, if they see you starting to put all their bottles in cardboard boxes and loading them into the boot of your car – well, would they think this was covered by their ‘Help yourself policy’?

I think not. This is all the X-Series Fair Use policy means.

As another example, we truly believe that a fair user will be hard pressed to use more than 5,000 Skype minutes a month. But imagine they did. Imagine an instance where they had a sick relative in Australia and went way beyond that limit? I would make personally sure that the fair use definition was not invoked to limit their use.

If on the other hand, someone was using Skype on X-Series to run a long distance call centre, well, I’d be equally determined to make sure they were shut down.

That’s it. Simple as that. So if you think “Fair Use” is being used unfairly in your case, as always, you know where to find me!

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