Australia's Telstra and archrival Optus will face off in court tomorrow over an Optus advertising campaign which Telstra asserts is misleading consumers.
Telstra has filed legal action in the Supreme Court of Victoria seeking to have Optus withdraw the ad campaign, which states that there is little difference between the population coverage of the two operators' mobile networks, Fairfax Mediareported.
A trial date has been set for tomorrow. SingTel subsidiary Optus has agreed to withdraw the ad from its website and stop making new versions pending the trial, but successfully argued that TV spots already paid for should continue to run.
The advertising asserts that Optus' mobile network covers 98.5% of the population while Telstra's covers 99.3%. Telstra's argument is that the claim could mislead customers into thinking the two networks have similar geographic coverage.
Telstra will argue that its network covers 2.3 million square kilometres compared to 1 million for Optus. Most of Australia's population is concentrated along a thin strip of coastal areas, and even a coverage area of 2.3 million square kilometres is only 28% of the country's land mass.
But Telstra doesn't seem to be disputing the population coverage figure, which is the claim made in the ad.