Communication Breakdown
Communications from the world of, er, communications. And other stuff.
Friday 22 June 2007, 12:03 PM
Mislead for speed
OK, so we all know that paying for an "8Mbps" broadband connection will not, in all likelihood, get you 8Mbps (due to a variety of reasons, not all the ISPs' fault). But it is a point worth driving home, just in case we get desensitised to the idea of advertisers being economical with the truth.
A moneysupermarket.com survey has shown that only 1 in 5 consumers get the broadband speed they signed up for. Amazingly, only 30 percent - out of a possible 80 percent - feel they have been misled. Like I say, perhaps these days we just expect it...
PreviousComments on this post
'Upto 8Mbps'/ADSLMax is wonderful, if you don't mind bandwidth throttling and high latency. It seems that the offer of possible faster broadband captures people's attention over the fact that they could be worse off that remaining where they are.
When friends/Family/co-workers/gamers enquire what type of ADSL package I'm on, giving them the answer '2Mbps' is an invite for them, to tell me about he benefits of ADSLMax and why I should change
While alot of people in the area are converting to the 8Mbps option they can't see the benefits of remaining at a 'restrictive' 2Mbps.
Sadly I think this blinkered view of always jumping on the next bigger, better & faster option is a trend of the times, besides who is going to complain when half the ISPs complaint departments are struggling to handle the calls of disgruntled customers waiting for their LLU to be performed.
As for me, I'll keep my low latency thank you.
I suppose it gets a bit like the whole issues of megapixels on digital cameras. People seem to think more is always better, but past a certain point it only means more noise...
