ANACOM Fines NOS 350,000 Euros for Rewriting 821,641 Contracts to Force Advertising Into TV Recordings
The regulator says NOS changed 821,641 contracts in one standardised move without giving each subscriber 30 days' written notice and the right to leave free of charge. Vodafone was fined 160,000 euros in July on the same grounds. Both are appealing.
ANACOM (Autoridade Nacional de Comunicações, the National Communications Authority) has fined NOS 350,000 euros for unilaterally rewriting the contracts of 821,641 subscribers in order to insert compulsory advertising into the automatic recordings on its television service. The regulator took the decision on 7 July and made it public on Monday.
The offence is procedural rather than commercial. ANACOM does not say NOS was forbidden from putting advertising in front of a recording. It says NOS changed the terms of more than 820,000 contracts "unilaterally and in an identical, standardised manner" without giving each affected subscriber what the law requires: written notice, in an adequate form, at least 30 days in advance, setting out the proposed change and the customer's right to walk away without paying anything if they did not agree.
The rule NOS is said to have broken
ANACOM grounds the fine in paragraph 16 of article 48 of the Lei das Comunicações Eletrónicas (Electronic Communications Law) as it stood at the time. That provision makes it an administrative offence for an operator to adopt "habitual or standardised conduct", or to issue instructions to staff or business partners, whose application is liable to breach legal rules or ANACOM determinations. It is aimed not at a single mishandled account but at the decision, taken once and applied to everyone, to skip a step the law makes mandatory.
NOS has appealed to the Tribunal da Concorrência, Regulação e Supervisão (Competition, Regulation and Supervision Court), so the fine is not final.
The second operator caught by the same reasoning
In July ANACOM fined Vodafone 160,000 euros on identical grounds, for altering the conditions of 448,236 customers without prior notice. Vodafone has also gone to court. Between the two decisions the regulator has now penalised operators over roughly 1.27 million subscriber contracts changed without the statutory warning.
The advertising itself already drew a much larger penalty from a different regulator. In June the Autoridade da Concorrência (Competition Authority) fined MEO, NOS, Vodafone and the consultancy Accenture 13.35 million euros over an anticompetitive agreement covering subscription television and advertising in recordings. That case, opened in 2021, concerned the three largest operators coordinating a 30-second advertisement before automatic recordings could be played, leaving dissatisfied customers with no effective operator to switch to because the service degraded everywhere at once.
Read together, the two lines of enforcement describe the same episode from opposite ends. The competition regulator says the operators agreed among themselves to introduce the advertising. The communications regulator says two of them then imposed it without giving subscribers the exit the law guarantees. Contract mechanics have become ANACOM's main pressure point on the sector: this month it also proposed compensation of up to 5,750 euros for botched internet-provider switches.
What this means for expats
- You are entitled to 30 days' written notice of any contract change: if your operator alters the terms of your television, internet or mobile service, it must tell you in writing, in advance, and tell you that you can leave without penalty.
- The no-cost exit survives a lock-in period: the right to terminate free of charge when the operator changes the deal applies even inside a fidelização (minimum-term commitment). Our guide to cancelling a Portuguese telecom contract sets out how to invoke it.
- The fine does not refund you: the 350,000 euros goes to the state, not to the 821,641 affected subscribers, and the free-exit window for the original change closed years ago.
- Nothing changes on your bill yet: both fines are under appeal, and neither decision orders the advertising removed. If you are weighing a switch, our comparison of Portuguese providers covers the practical differences.
The court will now decide whether ANACOM read the notification rules correctly, and its ruling will apply in substance to the Vodafone case too. Until then the working assumption is the one the regulator has stated twice this summer: a standardised change to hundreds of thousands of contracts still has to be delivered to each of those customers, one letter at a time.
