back to article Vodafone cops ads rap over Martin Freeman's vanishing spaceship

Vodafone was today slapped by the Advertising Standards Authority for quoting router sync speeds instead of throughput speeds in its advertising following a complaint from rival BT. The ad featured Hobbit star Martin Freeman engaging in some mild consensual online gaming action interrupted by a broadband-induced failure. Here' …

  1. Martin-73 Silver badge

    Umm

    As a user who is well acquainted with sync speed and what it means... I feel insulted by the usually toothless ASA.

    yes there's scope for abuse of sync speed vs throughput. But claiming that users don't know what it means is shullbit

    1. Jamie Jones Silver badge

      Re: Umm

      The target market for these ads isn't you though, and if everyone else uses actual speed, isn't it unfair for voda to use sync speed?

      1. Dan 59

        Re: Umm

        I don't think anyone else offers a discount straight out of the bag if your service isn't meeting an agreed rate?

        So there's no real comparison of everyone else using actual rate?

        1. Martin-73 Silver badge

          Re: Umm

          A&A offer me the fact they'll smack openreach with a big stick if my line doesn't reach the speed that the availability checker says?

          It does, and always does?

      2. Martin-73 Silver badge

        Re: Umm

        Fair point. I think they should be allowed to use sync speed. Provided they STATE that's what they're using.

        Post in haste, repent at leisure

    2. This post has been deleted by its author

    3. Tigra 07

      Re: Martin-73

      Martin Freeman, is that you?

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Neat plan

    Let's be fair here, all this reporting of their discount when your internet ain't up to snuff is the kind of advertising that you couldn't buy.

    Sure the advert implied it would fix more problems than it does, but the ASA's signal boost has certainly helped with their campaign.

  3. AndrueC Silver badge
    Boffin

    Throughput speed is the real-world maximum once realistic physical limitations and the like are taken into account.

    Um..and congestion. The only aspect of the end-user observed data rate that all UK ISPs can control and therefore the most important if you're going to attempt to rate an internet connection ;)

    I'm also impressed that it appears the ASA have more technical knowledge about broadband delivery than I have previously credited them with. I still think they are wasting their time trying to create a useful speed measure though. End-user observed data rates are specific to their router, their LAN and their telephone line. Adverts are regional or national so any figures they quote are always going to need interpretation.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      I still think they are wasting their time trying to create a useful speed measure though.

      But then advertisers should not such use a non-metric, which, if you are right, would then be wilfully misleading. A bit like when one has some problem on a support forum, and someone replies "works for me". Fascinating, but of no use whatsoever.

      1. defiler

        But then advertisers should not such use a non-metric

        You mean like The World's Favourite Airline or something? It sounds great, but it's mealy-mouthed enough to shrug off scrutiny.

  4. Giovani Tapini

    The only useful measure

    Is real world, consumer perceived throughput. Everything else is only going to be relevant to El Reg Commentards (nerds). This can also vary for reasons discussed above e.g. contended bandwidth, sometimes weather, etc. Unless they find a way of their router measuring available bandwidth over time to (where? the exchange? somewhere on the backbone?) some endpoint its all moot as neither side can agree a position.

    In my experience of being family IT support the router at "home" and the wired or wireless connection to it can also have quite a bearing on throughput. I assume that they only guarantee if you use their own equipment? (CBA to read all the fine print)

    Seems to me that this is just another layer of consumer obfuscation with an impossible carrot dangled from the advert.

    IMHO unless some kind of standardised test is agreed across the industry of what is sold against what can be used (that normal consumers can understand) the marketards will vary their pitch and repeat this discussion forever.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: The only useful measure

      IMHO unless some kind of standardised test is agreed across the industry of what is sold against what can be used (that normal consumers can understand) the marketards will vary their pitch and repeat this discussion forever.

      Like those standard fuel and co2 figures used in car advertising? They are meaningless and easily cheated on.

      1. AndrueC Silver badge
        Happy

        Re: The only useful measure

        Yeah. What we need is some kind of concept of 'it'll be as good as we can make it, all things considered'. Something like the current law on service provision that says the service doesn't actually have to be fit for the purpose or achieve any particular target :)

        But more seriously another aspect I've run into a lot is machines that just don't perform network I/O well. Almost every laptop I've bought has exhibited this. Run the Thinkbroadband speed test and they show poor single threaded throughput but multi-threaded is fine. Classic signs of congestion or possibly TCP window configuration issues. Interestingly though I've just bought an HP Pro Book 470 and for the first time in several years it actually has the same single and multi-threaded speed test results.

        1. Baldrickk

          Re: The only useful measure

          I've been able to max out the thinkbroadband speed test over wifi, let alone wired - getting higher throughput from other services.

          Granted that was ~130Mbs so plenty enough for Voda's advertised speeds, but still...

    2. Detective Emil

      Re: The only useful measure

      Unless they find a way of their router measuring available bandwidth over time …

      Well, you could try signing up with SamKnows. They used to give away "white box" measurement devices to anyone who asked; now there seems to be some sort of lottery.

  5. 89724102172714182892114I7551670349743096734346773478647892349863592355648544996312855148587659264921

    On the other hand... Martin Freeman was great in Cargo:

    https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/cargo_2018/

  6. Mongrel

    My other gripe with those commercials was, you're team mate is moaning at you because you've lost connection again... over the voice chat

    1. Tigra 07
      Thumb Up

      RE: Mongrel

      Glad someone else pointed that out!

    2. Captain Scarlet Silver badge
      Pint

      Blast you beat me to it, this infuriated me also.

    3. Jeffrey Nonken

      "My other gripe with those commercials was, [your] team mate is moaning at you because you've lost connection again... over the voice chat"

      I've actually seen that happen. Gaming buddy of mine's connection would go titsup but for some reason he had a few extra seconds of voice comms before being sucked into the black hole. "Uh oh, just lost my connection... " We knew he'd be back a few minutes later. And no, I don't think he was messing with us. Just some peculiarity of his crappy service.

      I also knew somebody who did voice comms over the phone in her lap while she played the game on their PC. (Obviously a third-party voice chat, not the in-game chat.) She theoretically could have lost one connection while maintaining the other.

      I'm not disagreeing with your complaint, mind you. Neither of the above is the usual case. I mean, that's all of two people.

  7. SkippyBing

    They're all the same speed

    Unless someone has found a way of propagating electricity or light through the same medium at different velocities.

    Always makes for an interesting conversation when people are trying to get me to change ISP. Bandwidth and latency always seem to be slightly too long words for them to get their heads around.

    1. Sam Liddicott

      Re: They're all the same speed

      speed means data rate in this conversation.

      The DSL data rate need not be related to the peering data rate, and on a badly managed ISP may be much less

      In a similar way, a 5 lane driveway between the front door and road won't reduce your journey time to the Sainsbury's even though the 5 line driveway is in your control.

      1. SkippyBing

        Re: They're all the same speed

        Depends how long your driveway is.

    2. This post has been deleted by its author

  8. Steve 39

    ISPs being creative with Watson their advertising - no sh*t Sherlock!

  9. Lee D Silver badge

    More importantly - you can sync at a Gigabit if you like. That doesn't mean you aren't throttling the traffic or overloading your backhaul so that users only ever get 1 bps.

    I "sync" at gigabit on every single piece of equipment I ever plug in. But it's a different matter to be able to offer gigabit downloads to every one of them simultaneously at peak time.

    Sync speed is misleading. Throughput speed is not. The ASA, for once, are catching on to the tricks.

    And unless you're using cellular / radio, the sync speed shouldn't be far off the real throughput if you're operating things properly. That high contention is finally gonna come back to bite you.

    They also have it backward:

    If the line is dodgy, the sync speed will be low, and that may be out of your control (i.e. the run is just that long or the line that noisy and your engineers can't fix it). If the sync speed is high but throughput is low - you have a bottleneck in your backend. That's entirely within your control.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I hadn't even noticed that bit of the advert as I was busy raging at the fucking stupid fact that the spaceship had gone yet he was still able to retain a voice over IP call...

    The spaceship would be stuck there not doing anything and he'd even have choppy voice, dalek or nothing at all.

    On to the complant - yeah I get that - with BT - I had a sync speed of something like 9Mbit/s but a throughput of 2Mbit/s on a good day. I still think they all need to sort that out and provide some minimum guarantee and pricing levels.

  11. Reaps

    ASA are useless

    They can't even understand what the word unlimited means even when you point them at a dictionary.

    and don't get me started on the other shit they let companies get away with..

    Fucking chocolate fireguards...

  12. hottuberrol

    When I see that ad, I am reminded that this is exactly my experience at home. Guess who my broadband provider is?

    And when I call Voda about the constant yet random disconnects....even quoting the time of the last one....first they try to make me do the rain-dance of "reboot", "change the wifi channel", "unscrew the BT plate and change the plug".....and then they tell me that their systems say there are no line problems and everything is fine....

  13. adam payne

    Using sync speeds is a little misleading for the average person.

    BT complaining about is funny given their past history.

    What I want to know is how is still talking to the guy on his headset when his broadband died.

  14. Simon Rockman

    Unlike the junk mail I got from BT which makes no mention at all of the speed it's trying to sell me with it's unlimited, superfast fibre. It did say that the speed was 5x what most people had, but not what it was actually selling me.

    I'm typing this slowly because I'm in rural Westminster (in what was the nearest residential home to the House of Commons before it became offices), and so BT can only get me 17mb/s.

    Hyperoptic arrives soon.

  15. David Austin

    I understand why they did it

    I wouldn't like to be responsible for promising X megabits/second will make it through a SuperHub 3 unscathed, either...

  16. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Well well, the corruption does on and up

    Why the Hell are we still calling >10Mb/s "ultrafast" it isnt!

    1. Spazturtle Silver badge

      Re: Well well, the corruption does on and up

      Especially when 'fast' in networking refers to 100Mbits, so so called superfast/ultrafast broadband doesn't meet the definition of fast.

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