BT roll out new broadband speeds: dead slow and stop…
01/01/2011

BT’s ongoing ad campaign cum soap opera about the adventures of Adam and Jane is not just a fairy story, it’s an outright lie, decided the Advertising Standards Authority when it banned the most recent episode in the series, which made exaggerated claims about BT’s broadband speeds. You can say that again, we said.

The TV commercial showed Adam being shown round a property by an estate agent as he talked to his partner Jane on his mobile. She was seen viewing the house on-line from her home computer, loading a website faster than the estate agent at peak time, before a voiceover said “BT is rolling out up to 20 meg speeds to give you a consistently faster broadband throughout the day, even at peak times”.

Phooey! Said a slew of public complaints, not to mention some heated objections by competitors Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin. And we have no hesitation in adding our voice to the chorus of catcalls and whistles.

Being in communications, our dependency on broadband is more or less absolute – not just for the workaday business of sending and receiving emails or making web searches, but for document transfers of advertising proofs and artwork to clients, printers and the press.

Imagine our consternation then, immediately after upgrading our broadband to a nominal 20 meg, when we found that BT were serving us at two speeds: dead slow and stop. To compound the error and add insult to injury, BT was in total denial of our problem. When, that is, we were able to contact them at all. For a communications company, BT can be remarkably uncommunicative, not to say elusive.

For a full week we tried to rouse them to action, whilst in the meantime we muddled through as best we could. One of our designers camped out with his laptop on the steps of our local wine bar, the only establishment in the area offering free WiFi to its customers. It had its compensations during opening hours: not since the Mad Men era has so much alcohol been consumed in the course of business, but you have to call time somewhere!

Eventually it came to light that there was a technical fault at their end, for which we were given scant apology, somewhat in contrast to the customer-centred service the TV commercials would lead you to expect. The worst of it is, this kind of thing gives advertising a bad name. There’s enough cynicism directed at the profession without feeding it.