Clearcast, the body responsible for clearing ads before they're shown on TV,
WTF happened to OFCOM ?
That's the best way to give companies free rein in advertising - make it a byzantine landscape for complaints and oversight.
TalkTalk's voice-over is writing speeds that its text can't match: Ad pulled from broadcast
An advert for TalkTalk broadband has been taken down for promoting incorrect speeds, The Register can confirm. The UK's Advertising Standards Authority was alerted after Reg reader Rich Campbell noticed the TV broadcast's voice-over speeds did not match the ones promoted in the text. "Clearly you need something like 600Mbps …
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Friday 23rd August 2019 06:05 GMT theblackhand
Re: Clearcast, the body responsible for clearing ads before they're shown on TV,
Clearcast are "a non-governmental organisation which pre-approves most British television advertising" (from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clearcast) and are owned by the commercial TV channels in the UK - they basically ensure that advertising meets BCAP/CAP standards before it is broadcast.
OFCOM are still the regulatory authority, but Clearcast is there as a commercial standards checker to try and avoid
It's probably the opposite of what you are suggesting - rather than OFCOM having to step in every time something goes wrong, the advertisers and broadcasters try to independently check that advertising meets the requirements to avoid excessive involvement by the regulator. It doesn't eliminate issues, as this shows, but it does help ensure regulatory overhead doesn't cause too many issues.
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Thursday 22nd August 2019 12:27 GMT mr-slappy
Advertising Standards Authority alerter
"The Advertising Standards Authority was alerted after Reg reader Rich Campbell noticed the TV broadcast's voice-over speeds did not match the ones promoted in the text"
I'm guess Reg reader Rich Campbell will start getting speeds of about 500kbps from TalkTalk pretty soon...
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Thursday 22nd August 2019 18:14 GMT Jamie Jones
Re: Advertising Standards Authority alerter
Sorry to upset you, but I am!
Why not? It's cheap, and works, and is just dumb pipe to me. Most of the critical infrastructure (fttc) is going to be openreach anyway.
I never have slow downs. The only issue for me is no native IPv6 but my router tunnels that to he.net which is only 7ms away.
Last months bandwidth use was 2.5Tb.
I could pay more, but I'm not into designer labels, or snobbery.
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Friday 23rd August 2019 06:18 GMT theblackhand
Re: Advertising Standards Authority alerter
You're lucky - you get your advertised speeds.
For the less fortunate, you have hours of pleasure talking to TalkTalk support who basically just get your to restart everything in the hope that either the problem or you go away. Providing clear details of the problem (the broadband connection is two slow, it is TRAINING at 512Kbps down/1Mbps up) leads to long conversations about how your wifi connection is causing the issue while you are connected via an ethernet cable. Asking for the issue to be escalated to engineering results in 4-5 follow up calls until eventually you stumble upon someone who actually tries to help and the issue is resolved 1-2 weeks later.
This isn't an isolated problem, I've assisted about a dozen friends or associates with this type of issue - while other ISP's generally just suffer contention issues or speed issues due to cabling problems, TalkTalks poor performance is largely through configuration errors on their part.
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Friday 23rd August 2019 14:18 GMT Jamie Jones
Re: Advertising Standards Authority alerter
Actually, I should have mentioned that. I agree 100%.
I have twice in the past reported a configuration error on their side. The first time (their youtube cdn server), someone clueless ended up suggesting I asked for help in the community(!).
The second time (reverse dns), they were again clueless, and it wasn't fixed until about a year later.
In both occasions, I was able to work around the problem - reporting it was a courtesy.
But you are entirely correct. The place I'm in now is only 4 years old, and I'm close to the cabinet, and always get 8MB/s + with the correct sites.
As it was the cheapest deal at the time, I see no reason not to keep it - it's been stable the 4 years that I've been here.
Of course, if I needed help, or indeed was suffering problems that were not my fault, I'd probably end up leaving quite quickly, but in the meantime, it works for me, and I feel most detractors are just being snobbish.
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Saturday 31st August 2019 09:31 GMT old man
Re: Advertising Standards Authority alerter
I agree with Jamie Jones about talktalk we get about 50mbs and phone calls included to landline & mobiles phones free for the first hour to Australia new Zealand Canada USA and all of Europe for £40 .Only problems we ever had were down to open reach. When we were with virgin phone calls alone were closer to £90 and they refused to let us take our number going
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Thursday 22nd August 2019 15:06 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: "We immediately took action to correct it once we became aware" . .
"We immediately took action to correct it once we became aware"
Unlike the John Lewis 'Never Knowingly Undersold' ploy... we'll keep the price high but will price match if you prove we're overcharging... but only to you and not the next mu^H^H punter who comes along
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Friday 23rd August 2019 05:39 GMT Anonymous Coward
TalkTalk are serially dishonest
A current example of their blatant dishonesty is come contract renewal time. Their website T&C's state that new subscriber deals are available to new and existing customers who have less than 90 days remanining on their existing contract, but try renewing on one, you can't. The live chat drones will deny all knowledge of the deal you're trying to get even though it'll be up on the website. Their usual pitch is just to say "It's not on my system" or that deal just expired and offer you some other deal (I've just spoken to my manager bull...).
After I had this experience I spoke to two others who had the exact same experience, apparently a hot topic on the forums too so not random one-offs.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
