Rival BT sics ad watchdog on EE: ASA growls at 'most reliable broadband' claim BT has successfully shot down EE's claim in a direct mail ad that it offered "Britain's most reliable broadband for staying connected". The telecoms giant convinced Blighty's advertising watchdog that EE had misled customers in three different ways. BT argued to the Advertising Standards Authority that EE had failed to …
Name another ISP that gives you a better router than BT?
The ones I've seen; Virgin, EE, Plus Net, BE give you a rebranded old model, low budget router where as BT give you something more midrange than the rest of them and you do notice much better wireless signal with BT than others.
Yes you can go and buy a router that is better, but no one is giving that to you so their claim is valid.
WTF, wireless router performance depends on any number of factors, the least important being the fixed line it's connected to. The consumer broadband marketing ecosystem is full of bull. I'm waiting for the honest ad with "Our wireless AC gigabit router is the fastest you can get! (although it is connected to our slow packet shaped network that prioritises our OTT services to the detriment of those you prefer to use)"
After all, these are always post-hoc. The ad went out, many people received it and some of those that received it bought EE. The market share was won. The fact that the campaign was misleading is irrelevant as far as EE is concerned, they were never going to use it again anyway.
c.f. BT advertises their broadband as "the most complete broadband package" despite missing various features that the more technically competent ISPs provide - static IP addresses etc - the ASA says "we can’t consider it to be an objective claim that requires further substantiation.".
Funny dat. Scorpion pit for the lot of 'em.
"Most consumers," the ASA added, "would believe 'broadband' referred to the internet connection from the telephone network to an internet enabled device, including the wireless connection transmitting the broadband connection from the router to the device."
No they wouldn't unless they were complete idiots.
It may be true that most consumers are complete idiots, but the ASA should not accept that as a defence. If you make a statement that is false, it remains false no matter how many stupid people you get to read it. If I stand up in court and make a false statement and then say "Well, no-one else in the court knew any better..." I'd expect the judge to take a dim view.
If the ASA is to have any purpose whatsoever, they have to base their judgements on what is objectively true, not what some twat down the local pub thinks after a few drinks.
"BT also berated EE for being a bit creative with metrics on latency, jitter and packet loss"
That, from the same BT whose managers stated to an ISP recently that packet loss is not considered a fault (and is something they neither monitor nor test for)?
http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2014/02/aaisp-bt-lock-horns-3-percent-fttc-broadband-packet-loss.html
(Of course, the fault in question was eventually tracked to a faulty 10GbE port on a BT backbone router and fixed ... though without ever admitting that the problem they had fixed qualified as a fault.)
I wish they'd ban these confusing "£3.49 per month" (only for 6 months, then much more) offers.
As is intended, just makes comparisons more confusing. Most providers (as with mobile/cellphones) seem to share some infrastructure and offer essentially the same services -- so comparison ought to be fairly easy.
I remember the days before the BT split when I was on the Broadband Helldesk.
Those heady days of free modems that Kellogs wouldn't allow near Cornflake packets as they were so bloody cheap and nasty - the free modems that the other ISP's handed out and went bust (if they worked at all) and then, when reported, were all shunted over to our queues by the ISP's as 'BT fault'.
We then proved it was the modems and punted the job back - usually they came sraight back to us as they were about to fail the queue times with their ID's on the job.
Come the Wholesale slaughter and Opensore split there was a rather intrusive demand that connection was paramount - those of us who asked about any possibility of an actual worthwhile service instead of just a ping were told to keep to the script. Those who still argued the customers case were put in the naughty team and given all the jobs that had been hanging around too long and costing valuable bonus time for the middle tier.
It seems that many years down the road the main measure for performance is connectivity time - which is bollocks.
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