BEST EVER broadband? Oh no you DIDN'T, Sky – ad watchdog The telecoms giant formerly known as BSkyB has been ordered to remove a "best ever" broadband ad after rival BT claimed it was "misleading". The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said the context of Sky's "BEST EVER broadband offer" in July had not been substantiated and was likely to mislead. Last week BSkyB ditched the …
Sort of funny - BT clam Sky are trying to buy customers. From the Telco that gives £100 Sansbury's vouchers routinely...
But what BT are best at is the lock in - you must have our phone line they say (OK, everyone has joined that bandwagon of the big players), but hey take our broadband to get BT Sport and so on... all nicely tied in.
Of course Sky can be just as bad, but for either to claim they have the upper ground is a lie in itself.
Still, that's nothing compared to Virgin and its never ending "deals" that also require a phone line rental to achieve said price, even though they haven't even got the technical excuse of "needing" that line...
Gits the lot of them...
"Gavin Patterson, BT chief executive, has previously accused Sky of "buying" customers with its special offers."
Clearly BT are incensed at the prospect of the commoners getting a benefit from dealing with a corporation. Don't Sky know you just lock the peasants into a 2 year contract (3 when we can slither it through) and ignore them until they are free to leave?
Of course Sky know that. They are no better than BT. They are also pretty stupid, sending numerous offers to "come back", knowing full well that when you sign up with a rival phone company you have probably signed a 2 year deal and couldn't come back if you wanted. Maybe if they weren't so useless at listening to customer complaints, didn't constantly ramp up up their prices and didn't want to charge you £60 for a cheap router to replace the useless cheap router that they acknowledged had a fault and refused to fix.Oh, wanting to charge virtually the same price for 40Mbs compared to BT offering over 60Mbs, and delivering over 70Mbs, when fibre was installed in the local cabinet...
If the ASA or other appropriate body could actually enforce something that all the advertising had to show you the minimum contract period and the total cost for the service over that time, including all the line rentals and packages etc., and those figures had to be as prominent as the big monthly cost number and the 'up to' figure, oh and any download limits and some kind of minimum agreed speed at similar sizes would be nice too.
What? too much honesty for the marketing departments?
" the 'up to' figure, oh and any download limits and some kind of minimum agreed speed "
I'd like to the see words "up to" required to be as prominent as the numbers, the adverts required to state if they are reselling anyone else's infrastructure and if so whose (so if you're buying diverse network you know you aren't going to end up with both links in the same cab at the same exchange - hi, Openretch),
And of course if they are filtering at all - on port, protocol, or just URI - a published list of everything that is blocked and why, with supporting docs like the order.issued by a UK court, requiring that exact URI to be blocked.
I'm tired of all this moaning about the use of the words "up to" in broadband advertising. We're not stupid. When we see and advert for a sale with "up to 50% off" we don't complain we've been misled when the item we buy is only discounted. When we see an advert claiming we "could save up to £250 on our car insurance" we don't complain when we only save £25. Why? Because we speak English and we understand what the words "up to" mean.
One thing that would be nice is a ban on ISPs advertising services in areas where they don't offer those services. We've all seen the billboards advertising fibre speeds where you can only get plain vanilla ADSL at a maximum of 8Mbps.
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