Sir, you are a polypragmatist. Mind your own business
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Broadband ads confuse punters
BLIGHTY ISP Virgin Media is looking to clear up confusion among broadband users by publishing a truthful representation of its Internet access bandwidth speeds.
The admirable Virgin has started this transparency move to expose the shortcomings of others, which is truly benevolent of it, and we can only mutter to ourselves that its intended result must be to send its competitors' frustrated customers in the direction of its sales teams.
According to Virgin, which used to market its products by having Samuel L Jackson shout at us or Uma Thurman purr at us, broadband advertising is misleading and that needs some clarification.
Virgin found some of its consumers that were happy to answer questions about misleading broadband advertising and found that nine out of ten of them thought that it was 'misleading'. Virgin said that this confusion came about because firms insisted on using terms such as 'up to' to qualify their boasts of delivering fast connections.
Virgin's own webpages are littered with the same 'up to' terminology. At the time of writing you can get up to 10MB, or up to 20MB, and you can even opt for the up to 50MB connection if you really fancy it and are willing to pay the monthly charge.
Jon James, executive director of broadband at Virgin Media said, "People are paying for faster and faster broadband but being ripped off by unscrupulous providers who can't deliver their promised speeds to even a single customer. A change in advertising is urgently needed to build consumer confidence in super-fast broadband and the industry more generally."
Making itself a lot more scrupulous-looking, Virgin will publish its 'average' monthly speeds itself, straight from its own systems, and defines the typical speed as "the average speed received by two thirds of customers over a 24 period".
You can check the results from Virgin's study of a presumably preferred two-thirds majority on any given twenty-four hour period here. µ
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I think this is all a bit rich coming from Virgin Media. There head line figures might be a average of 10Mps on it 10Mps connection but what they are failing to tell you is your severely traffic shaped and if you go over your meagre limit of lets face it no more than an hours worth of good quality video or less than half a game download your then restricted to five hours or more and yes you can hit it twice in one day of a line speed of 2.5mb its all smoke and mirrors on Virgin Media's part I think and they are not cheap either. The upload speeds are half that of the other suppliers which is no good in the age of uploading photos and video to social networking sites. The upload cap is also traffic managed a very paltry amount.
Is this the same Virgin Media who advertised their product as 'fibre optic broadband' for years, despite it using the same last mile over copper as all other broadband services, until they were stopped by the ASA for misleading advertising?
I don't know what happen to the Smart GM (General Manager) of many ISP in Indonesia. The like conpire to give a plan that:
1. Up to 500 MB Quota
2. After 500 MB it will go down to 8 KB/s.
The funy think is they are all telling the world that the support HSDPA, Dual HSDPA, and LTE, but still don't remove the above plan.
So no mather if it is 4G, 5G, 6G, 7G, as long as your quota pass 500 MB (which each generation will be shorter, LTE will make the quota out for less than 3 minutes) the speed will become 8 KB/s.
It all at the cost as 7 BIGMAC a month (to make more universal cost I use BIGMAC, so in your country 7 BIGMAC will get you how much internet speed?)
The point is the are all cheating. I use 5% of true internet unlimited and get lock :(. I pay 100% of the cost.
Five percents for unlimited HSDPA is from 3,1 mbps * 3600 * 24 * 30 / 8 / 1024 = 981 GB. 981 GB a months = my limit for unlimited. Yet, I only use max 50 GB a month. So 50 / 981 * 100 = 5%.
I have 20meg broadband, i get about 16 meg which is fine. What is fundamentally wrong with virgin media is that it throttles your connection down to around 4meg at busy times of the day and also if you have the cheek to use the internet to download more than 4 gig a day. They are as bad as the rest. What is the point of 50 meg when they will knock it down to around 10 if you use the thing you are paying for.
Virgin shouldn't use words they don't understand, Misleading != confusing
Misleading = to lead in a wrong direction or into a mistaken action or belief OFTEN BY DELIBERATE DECEIPT (Merriam Webster).
And OFCOM are fully complicit in this. They've actively tolerated it for years. Not to mention the Phorm fiasco that NO ONE HAS STILL BEEN PROSECUTED OVER.
If 9 out of 10 customers are so dissatisfied, why don't they leave? Or are they just too stupid?
You don't only have to be willing to pay for it, you must also live in an area that has been cabled up to receive it, what's that .... about 15% of the country?
And one last thing... Virgin, stop annoying me with your bl**dy adverts until you can pull your fingers out and invest in some more local fibre... You remember that stuff? You know, the "wire" you stopped putting into the local streets over 20 years ago!
How about with have information provided by a neutral party...
A 50Mb local connection is meaningless if the backbone can't handle the subscribed customers, and intrusive traffic shaping is imposed.
Neutral party info should show...
Down speed (measured over several periods of the day)
Up speed (again, multiple samples)
Download limit (for those *unlimited* contracts)
Port blocking/negative shaping test
Then the price.
Of course they will publish the exact results taking the average when you're speed drops massively due to traffic management for 5 hours.
Won,t they?
I wonder whether VM's new found honesty will actually extend to it stopping the interception of it's customers browsing using DPI (Deep Packet Inspection).
Maybe it could be pursuaded to consider the right its customers have to privacy (PECR) and not to have communications snooped on (Ripa 2000).
More here:
https://nodpi.org/forum/index.php/topic,2262.0.html