That's why god invented the 10 metre USB cable.
That's why god invented the 10 metre USB cable.
That's because Britain is historically a very creative nation, we invent things. However we're not very good about complaining (although reading this forum you'd be forgiven for being suprised).
It's like we have a national tendancy to queue up for things, I meen seriously, are any Brits here able to walk past a queue? I find myself queing at the post office the other day because I was walking past and felt the urge to wait in line, I had no reason or business to be there, but upbringing is important y'know!
We don't complain enough, the government is in the pocket of the businesses and over-regulates the wrong things, and fails to regulate the fundamentals. Trading Standards are too busy doing training courses for handling of a rabbies outbreak to bother about enforcing consumer rights (seriously), and most Brits are not even aware that all electronic goods are, according to EU case precedent, warrantied for a minimum of 3 years - in some cases 6.
Nope, the hardware belongs to you at the end of the contract in all cases where "free" hardware is included. Even the laptops, though they're bags of spanners.. but they're YOUR bags of spanners provided you see the contract out.
I'm not quite sure I agree with your analysis of Statutory consumer law. I would perceive the test of "as advertised" under the Trades description act as quite a strong demarcation point for provision of differing levels of "service" provision. However, I would agree that the ISPs in general are playing very close to the line of legality and probably have well and truely overstepped the moral line with the levels of service they provide at times.
Actually legally "support" is a form of "service" and so to some degree the terms are interchangeable. It's pretty much accepted contractually that you get what you pay for vis-a-vis "support" and so therefore it can be equally applied to the level of "service" received. In my industry, (and I'm sure you're familiar with the term), we use Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to contractually define the level of Service/Support any particlar customer can expect to receive. However, I accept that the terminololgy may well be applied somewhat differently in other industries.
Well pretty much anything can be termed a "product" in all honesty.
I had a feeling you would respond along these lines.
And what is deemed "reasonable" is dependent entirely by the way the service is described (including any such limitations stated within that description).
Actually, what I was suggesting was that when paying for a home service you had no right to the expectation of the same levels of response and resolution times as you do on a business service. I made no comment what so ever on what you're actual use of the broadband service should be. You are free to use it for whatever purpose you like, just don't expect BT to have it fixed in a couple of hours if you're not paying for that level of service. Which by the way, I'm not implying that you personally are expecting. I am making a generalised statement.
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Really you think so? I think you'll find that actually we're not as far away from that reality as you'd like to think. In practice people are not completely free to choose to do whatever they wish, they are constrained by the fact they have to survive in a capitalist society. They have bills to pay, dependants to look after etc. For the majority of people moving job isn't always as simple as you would like to make it out to be. They are constrained by their knowlege, skills and experience and retraining is very often not viable either because of time or cost constraints. This plus employers ever increasing unwillingness to train people or take any kind of risk when employing people, (and ever increasing "wish list" skills expectations), only serves to further entrench people in the industry trap. So whilst the "theory" of worker mobility is all very well and good the reality is very very different.
Which opens up a whole other debate. I've had three main careers in my life. I started out fixing computers, I moved to technical support - which is not much of a jump in fairness and some of my jobs had me doing both. However I then switched profession and moved into R&D, specifically software development.
Retraining costed nothing, I did it myself, in my own time. I did not need a university certificate because I could show them what i'd made for myself, in my own time.
If I had gone for a job designing bridges I could take small mock up bridge designs.
If I had gone for a job laying bricks I could build a wall around my garden and show them photo's.
If I had gone for a job as a hairstylist I could have done my friends and shown them pictures, or used a mannekin.
If I had gone for a job as a writer I could show them something I had written.
I have never understood why so many people put so much store in training, like they have this period between 9 and 5 that they are willing to work or train and the rest of their time is their own.
You make of your own life what you can, it's up to you and nobody else. If you want to switch career you can do it easily. Maybe not instantly, but with due diligence and enough motivation the Western world is an oyster of opportunity.
If you feel persecuted, it's yourself doing the persecuting.Well to be fair on OFCOM they did challenge the ISPs about the use of the term "up to" in their advertising and they were at one point going to force them to use "average expected speed" (or some such) in their advertising instead. However, it doesn't seem to have happened. I think OFCOM are pretty aware of the issues, it's just that they either lack the teeth or the will to do anything about it.
Just to make certain other things clear. I'm no supporter of the way ISPs do business, especially with regard to the way they advertise their products/services. However, I have spent most of my career in the Telecoms industry and so I know only too well how unreasonable some customers can be with regard to their expectations. Admittedly the industry is partially to blame for the raising of these expectations in the first place. But as is often the case it's not the senior execs that come up with these wonderful ideas about how to service the customer that have to pay price in terms of workload and sheer unpleasantness faced by the employees down at the bottom of the pile.
Whilst we have some ISP bods replying, can I just stick in an OT ?
A friend of mine has recently seen his sync speed drop to 1500ish down, still 832 up, it shows no signs of increasing. BTs availability checker says that the line can only support 1mbit, but previously he has had a rock solid sync at approx 4000.
What would be the best way to go about getting this seen to ?
A friend of mine has recently seen his sync speed drop to 1500ish down, still 832 up, it shows no signs of increasing. BTs availability checker says that the line can only support 1mbit, but previously he has had a rock solid sync at approx 4000.
What would be the best way to go about getting this seen to ?
call his ISP's tech support. report the fault. the more people report the fault the more it is brought to the ISP's attention. more poeple could now be on the same exchange and the bandwidth is shared out accordingly. so you might get some run of the mill responce from the tech supprt agents.
From what I've observed, I'd say that ISPs broadly have overstepped the bounds of legality. Also, from what I've observed of OFCOM's responses, I'd say that OFCOM is entirely complicit, purposefully to the benefit of the ISP and the detriment of consumers.
All the ISP SLAs that I've either had or read refer not so much to the reliability or quality of the product but instead set out compensatory definitions in the event of downtime/issues. No SLA should be without the obligatory assurances of best attention and expediency in resolution, but I've never been left with the impression that the SLA itself varies the base expectation of dependability or reliability.
That being very much the point I'm trying to make. And nowhere is the distinction between a product and a service less well defined than in UK consumer law.
The issue is less that business customers receive better service than home users, it's that business customers receive the standard of service that home users SHOULD (by law!) receive and that the level of service that home users receive is substantially below that which, in every other aspect of commerce, would be regarded as between inadequate and no service at all.
ISPs are perpetually failing to meet the very minimum of standards required in all other aspects of consumer law, and that is a deliberately manufactured, unacceptable and untenable situation.
As I said before, ISPs are achieving this substandard service level not because they can legally get away with it, but because of OFCOM's complicitly, they can ILLEGALLY get away with it.
To be fair to consumers, they held off for over 5 years after first receiving complaints about it, and after several hundred thousand complaints had been received. And, as you say, they only motioned. They still haven't actioned. 7 years, now, I think.. and still no action.
Compare that with 17 complaints about a Mac's "most powerful PC in the world" TV advert, from PC users, and the advert was off-air in under 72 hours. OFCOM is entirely complicit with ISPs, most particularly with BT. Unacceptably so.
Sam,
You'll get no argument from me with regard to the quality of service (or lack of) provided by ISPs. To be honest I see it as more evidence of the completely different perceptions of the meaning of "service availability" that has always existed between the Telecoms and the IT worlds. ISPs are by and large populated by people from the IT world with thier general acceptance of down time and belief that 90% network availability is acceptable where as the Telecoms industry has traditionally always believed there is no excuse for anything but 100% network availability and used the technology required to achieve as close to that goal as possible. However, traditional Telecoms technology is expensive and most carriers, (including telecoms providers unfortunately), either have moved or are moving towards IP based (IT) technologies that despite what many people will have you believe just can't guarantee the service. A glowing example of the differences between the two ideologies is clearly shown by the difference between using access technologies such as the likes of ADSL/Cable Vs Leased Lines. One provided as an unguaranteed service with no SLA and the other coming with guaranteed bandwidth and up-time availability, (but at a cost).
To be honest, much of this change has been driven, as I said, by a heightening of customer expectations by the industry in an attempt to capture market share. Ever increasing demand by consumers to lower prices have forced operators to use ever cheaper technologies and lowering margins to the point where the only way they can actually provide a service at the cost the customer wants, and still remain in business, is to use techologies that are essentially only just about viable for the purposes required.
But then, I'm just an old git decrying the ever decreasing standards in our world
You'll get no argument from me with regard to the quality of service (or lack of) provided by ISPs. To be honest I see it as more evidence of the completely different perceptions of the meaning of "service availability" that has always existed between the Telecoms and the IT worlds. ISPs are by and large populated by people from the IT world with thier general acceptance of down time and belief that 90% network availability is acceptable where as the Telecoms industry has traditionally always believed there is no excuse for anything but 100% network availability and used the technology required to achieve as close to that goal as possible. However, traditional Telecoms technology is expensive and most carriers, (including telecoms providers unfortunately), either have moved or are moving towards IP based (IT) technologies that despite what many people will have you believe just can't guarantee the service. A glowing example of the differences between the two ideologies is clearly shown by the difference between using access technologies such as the likes of ADSL/Cable Vs Leased Lines. One provided as an unguaranteed service with no SLA and the other coming with guaranteed bandwidth and up-time availability, (but at a cost).
To be honest, much of this change has been driven, as I said, by a heightening of customer expectations by the industry in an attempt to capture market share. Ever increasing demand by consumers to lower prices have forced operators to use ever cheaper technologies and lowering margins to the point where the only way they can actually provide a service at the cost the customer wants, and still remain in business, is to use techologies that are essentially only just about viable for the purposes required.
But then, I'm just an old git decrying the ever decreasing standards in our world
In the 1950's the trains did not run on time.
I wasn't alive in the 1950s thank you very much !
ISP's, why are they so useless?
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