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Boost Mobile and Optus have settled their differences over the latter telco launching its “Optus Mobile Boost” and “Optus Internet Boost” services.
In a joint statement, the telcos stated they have “resolved their dispute concerning Boost Tel's BOOST trade marks” ahead of the case being heard in the Federal Court on 20 June.
Specifically, Optus denies it engaged in any trade mark infringement but claimed it decided to relaunch the tools under different names “for commercial reasons”. The services in question are now named Mobile Turbocharge and Internet Turbocharge.
Terms of the settlement are confidential.
In February, Boost Mobile threatened Optus with potential legal action over the use of Boost in the branding of the services, which enabled users to maximise data speeds.
For the service formerly known as “Internet Boost”, internet speeds on the National Broadband Network (NBN) could be increased for 24 hours for $5, while “Mobile Boost” offered the chance of prioritising mobile data connection for $2 per hour.
In response, Peter Adderton, Boost Mobile founder, alleged on 24 February that this was “a deliberate attempt to trade off our valuable Boost brand and success”, as Boost utilises Telstra’s network, not Optus’.
A month later in March, it came to light that Optus admitted it was aware of a potential conflict when using the term "boost" for its new services in the lead up to facing legal action and was ordered to stop using the term in the interim.
In the submitted evidence for the case, Justice Thawley referred to a marketing brief, which was dated 20 May 2022, and said it ended with “We can’t call the boost products ‘boost’ as this conflicts with Boost Mobile”.
“It is unlikely that Optus commenced its roll-out of the new features without investigating this issue closely,” the judge said.
Despite this, the services did still launch with the Boost name and the telco in fact had planned to increase promotion of them in March.
