UK watchdog slaps 'misleading' Voda ad: Gigafast... maybe so – but not for £23

The UK's Advertising Standards Authority has slammed Brit telco Vodafone's ads for its "Gigafast Broadband" as misleading. The complaint, from Virgin Media, referred to Vodafone's website which, on 15 November 2018, included descriptions of "Vodafone Gigafast" such as "Blast off at an average of 900Mbps" and "Enjoy lightning- …

[Aladdin Sane]

The web page must not continue to appear in the form complained of. We told Vodafone Ltd not to imply that a package capable of achieving 1Gbps was available for £23 a month

So, once again, no meaningful penalty?

[Is It Me]

It's fine they now start from £28 per month so they can run the adverts again

[phuzz]

"no meaningful penalty?"

The ASA doesn't seem to have any sanctions that are monetary in nature. If they think that a company has been really naughty, then they'll refer them to Trading Standards for punishment. I assume they don't have any actual power to issue fines.

Otherwise the worse they can do is stop their members from cooperating with a company, eg no bulk mail discounts from Royal Mail.

There's a full explanation of their sanctions here.

[Semtex451]

They can always call it Fibrefast as the ASA and high court would have no problem with that at all.

FFS

[Sam Crawley]

Seems to contradict the recent CityFibre judgement?

So punters can cope with "Fibre" in the name meaning faster broadband even if there's no fibre, but can't cope with "Giga" meaning even faster, even if it's not gigabit?

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2019/04/15/asa_cityfibre_fibre_broadband_judicial_review/

[Flak]

Re: Seems to contradict the recent CityFibre judgement?

Yes, but the devil is in the detail.

For FTTC, the achieved speed is rate limited by the technology (copper to the home).

In the 'Gigafast' case, the rate limiting is done by Vodafone for the benefit of extracting more money from its customers on the full fibre, Gigabit capable (assume CityFibre) infrastructure.

Two wrongs don't make a right and while I disagreed with the 'Fibre broadband' judgement, I agree with the one against Vodafone. The term 'Giga' in Internet terms is always tied to Gigabits per second.

Finally 'Gigafast' is just terrible marketing word butchery and the verdict was right for that reason alone :-)

I shall come off my high horse now...

[Sam Crawley]

Re: Seems to contradict the recent CityFibre judgement?

Fair points.. and is that high horse "CanterFast" or "GallopFast" capable?! :)

[GBE]

Re: Seems to contradict the recent CityFibre judgement?

So punters can cope with "Fibre" in the name meaning faster broadband even if there's no fibre,

It's copper fiber! Yea, that's it. We never said "optical" fiber did we?

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: Seems to contradict the recent CityFibre judgement?

"So punters can cope with "Fibre" in the name meaning faster broadband even if there's no fibre"

The judgement did actually specify that "fibre" meant at least Cable or FTTC in his definitions, ie co-ax or copper phone lines from the street cabinet was allowable as "fibre", but it must be fibre at least to the cabinet. He specifically excluded ADSL and it's ilk as copper from the exchange is not "fibre".

As Flak said, the devil is in the detail.

[I&I]

Megabit in a Gigabit world

Gah... can only dream of that in rural Hampshire where fibre can only reach as “high” as 20MBps sorry 0.02Gbps. Discounting (very frequent) drop-outs, that is.

[TRT]

Re: Megabit in a Gigabit world

Well, they're not likely to call it 'killerfast' broadband, are they? Megafast, I can get. That would do.

And VM only refer to Superfast. I'm waiting for Hyperfast.

Ah, don't you just love the smoke and mirror tricks of marketeers? Where they take a word and obfuscate the specific technical meaning in order to make it sound better than it is, possibly respelling it in the process. Forever onwards, following their pollution of the language, there will be a shadow around the actual meaning of the term. There's now a fibre-shadow, and I suppose this particular shadow would be the giga-shadow.

[I&I]

1/3:3/1

By way of comparison, “Terahertz” in Wikipedia “...consists of electromagnetic waves within the ITU-designated band of frequencies from 0.3 to 3 terahertz (THz)”.

(...while rural Blighty is lucky if it gets shortwave; not that I’m feeling grudgy or anything...)

[Steve Carr]

Re: 1/3:3/1

Seeing a fair bit of 100PetaHertz EM wave bouncing of the green fields of rural England this afternoon

[Headley_Grange]

Re: 1/3:3/1

@Steve - I see what you did there.

[Alan Brown]

Re: 1/3:3/1

surely the 576nm fields?

[Ken Moorhouse]

Re: 100PetaHertz EM wave bouncing of the green fields of rural England this afternoon

Which is totally screwed up if using cloud services.

[Evil Genius]

Re: 100PetaHertz EM wave bouncing of the green fields of rural England this afternoon

For you, sir. Well played.

[Alan Brown]

Re: 1/3:3/1

" ITU-designated band of frequencies from 0.3 to 3 terahertz (THz)"

Yes....... now check the wavelengths in cm or mm.

There's a reason the bands are in 3-30 ranges and it has something to do with the speed of light

[I&I]

Re: 1/3:3/1

And something in Sèvres

[Headley_Grange]

Re: 1/3:3/1

..... L, S, C, X, Ku, K, Ka........ etc., when I was a boy.

[I&I]

Re: 1/3:3/1

When I was a boy (before the age-change), offshore Pirate Radio transmitters carried warping devices (proper valves) to ensure the wavelength rhymed with the station name.

(and people would curl up in bed with their trannies!...)

[Ken Moorhouse]

Re: ...and people would curl up in bed with their trannies!...

I heard a lot about this permissive society thing when I were a lad.

[the spectacularly refined chap]

Re: 1/3:3/1

There's a reason the bands are in 3-30 ranges and it has something to do with the speed of light

The ITU are smart enough not to casually equate the two like that: when they say frequency they mean frequency, when they say wavelength they mean wavelength, depending on the quantity that is relevant at the time. There is not a fixed relationship between the two because the speed of light itself is not fixed but dependent on the medium, i.e. fibre in this instance. Wavelengths in fibre are significantly shorter than frequency over 300,000 would suggest.

The 3-30 ranges are to centre each band around its nominal frequency - it makes far more sense to consider a 990MHz signal as a gigahertz signal rather than alongside a 1MHz or even 100MHz signal. The centering is done on an order of magnitude (logarithmic) basis so it would be 3.16-31.6 ranges but they are rounded to 3's for convenience.

[Headley_Grange]

Surely...

... , given that broadband isn't considered to be "fast" until it's above 10MB/s then "Gigafast" broadband should be at least 10 PB/s, shouldn't it?

[ukgnome]

How can broadband providers keep falling into the speed trap - what a bunch of giga-plonkers

[TRT]

I'd say they live in a world of hyperbole. That would make it all a load of hyperbollocks.

[Anonymous Coward]

Had a complaint at work today

Someone logged a call complaining that copying a 100MB file through a vpn connection to their house was going to take about 6 minutes and it wasn’t good enough....

Just closed the call with a comment of what is wrong with that!

So yes some people will find anything to moan about (I could have mentioned it was the school holidays and kids on xboxes but it wasn’t worth doing)

[Craigie]

Re: Had a complaint at work today

What's wrong with that is that it's pitifully slow. Unless the user only needed to download that one not very large file once, then I suppose they can wait, once. But working with a decent amount of data at that speed would be maddening.

[TRT]

Re: Had a complaint at work today

Ha! Try copying 100TB over a 1Gbs link.

[Aristotles slow and dimwitted horse]

So how exactly...

"The UK's Advertising Standards Authority has slammed Brit telco Vodafone"

It doesn't look like that to me. It looks more like they've been told that they are very naughty boys and to not to do it again. Hardly a "slamming".

[DontFeedTheTrolls]

Not allowed to call it Giga, but they're still allowed too claim its "unlimited" even when there are fair use limitslimits