Is broadband being mis-sold?


Imagine you are buying a new car. Because you do quite a bit of motorway driving you want one that will cruise happily at 70mph. So a good reasonably-priced, economical model boasting a top speed of 80 mph catches your eye.

You enquire with the salesman who says that on your particular roads the car will only do 40 mph, but no other model will go any faster. Slightly disappointed, you sign up. After all, on that basis this new car is going to be more than twice as fast as your old car.

You take the car home and you find that the car will only do a maximum of 18 mph and that only on a good day. Normally, your car won't go any faster than between four and 15 mph.

Would you feel cheated? Of course you would!

But that is basically is what the broadband companies are doing. I kept being encouraged to change to BT Total Broadband with the famous 8MB headline speed. There are plenty of others offering the same attractive-sounding package.

I checked and found that my telephone number was only expected to deliver up to 4MB, but that was still more than twice what I was getting. So, eventually I gave in to the constant promotion and decided to upgrade.

I received an email welcoming me to "faster broadband". But my excitement was short lived.

BT Total Broadband was, if anything, delivering slower speeds than I used to get with BT Broadband. Rather than 4MB, I am getting 1.8MB on a good day. If we could get that consistently I would be happy, but more normally we get between 0.4 and 0.8MB at peak times. At times the speeds slump to less than 1% of the promised maximum speed of 4MB.

So what to BT have to say about this. Well, after ten weeks, basically I have a shrug of the shoulders and a blank look. They say there is nothing they can do.

Imagine the car manufacturer getting away with saying there was nothing they could do about an 80 mph car that struggled to do 4 to to 15 mph!

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Posted: Tue - April 24, 2007 at 10:00 AM          

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