Abusing "unlimited" features

[afreak]

For some reason, I have decided to see what the limits of my mobile phone carrier's unlimited plans are. In my case, I get unlimited text messaging as well as unlimited local inbound calls. This has given me a "brilliant" idea.

Since I have a VoIP line that I rarely use at night, how about I dial my mobile phone, leave it off the hook only letting the hum of a fan or something go into the mouthpiece, and then hang up 8 hours later. If I did this on a consistent nightly basis, that would mean I'd add up around 14,000 minutes of air time each month just on free calls.

I wonder how long it would take for the company to cancel my contract because I was making good use of my unlimited features?

[MIB]

There's only one way to find out.

If they cancel your contract you can create some negative publicity for the phone company. Make it sound like their advertisement for unlimited calling is false. They will probably give you some sort of settlement to keep things quiet.

MIB

[linear]

Some companies have "Fair Usage" clauses built in to the contract. For example, if you're using Skype for your VoIP, they have "unlimited" SkypeOut calls, but what they really mean is 10,000 minutes a month. Mobile carriers will generally have similar stipulations.

i would read your plan carefully before doing that because it could backfire on you pretty bad.

[rbcp]

They will probably give you some sort of settlement to keep things quiet.

I doubt they'd do that.  Companies always claim unlimited on limited things.  Like Comcast capping bandwidth in the news lately.  Back in my dialup days, I paid for the unlimited dialup plan and between my wife and I, we used it about 10 - 15 hours a day.  Every couple months they would call and threaten to shut off our account for using too much of our unlimited dialup.  They accused me of using IRC or ICQ to keep the connection on all the time and said that was against policy.  I had some epic arguments with those people.  I've heard that Skype and Vonage cut you off if you use too much on their unlimited plans too.

[JD716]

I wonder about unlimited TXT messaging. Verizon doesn't have to seem TOO bad of limits (i've had months where i've used 15,000 a month that doesn't include IN messaging). Alberta, what is your carrier?