Bigponds disgraceful marketing

Bigpond have advertisements that they run, and marketing campaigns that they run to attract customers.

Unfortunately, they are generally misleading to consumers on many details.

Some of these are:

1. 200Mb, failing to disclose just what exactly 200Mb is. Many users don’t know this, and besides, to be a fair comparison with the market, it should be 0.2GB. That’s what you are getting, afterall, right?

2. Counting of uploads. Many of the advertisements claim 200Mb DOWNLOADS. This is misleading, as you can’t download something without first sending a request to download it, those requests are uploads. So, if you focus on 10% of your traffic being upload traffic, you are actually getting 0.1GB of download traffic, because 0.02GB of that traffic is upload traffic (and counted).

A recent scenario presented on Whirlpool outlines what someone went through with Bigpond, after being told that his plan would include 25GB of downloads. It’s physically impossible to download 25GB without uploading a single MB, and therefore, misleading.

The thread tells the tale of how a customer was mislead into a CONtract by a marketing representative of BigPond, and demonstrates that no matter what you hear from the phone from the scum staff that claim you get “200Mb of downloads” that Telstra employ, they should never, ever, be relied on for any accurate information. In fact, if they call you, find your younger child, dog, cat, senior citizen, and get them to waste the time.

I do that when I get calls asking for anything other than me personally, and we’ve had some funny ones.

In fact, a fair while back, I was taking calls for someone else, and the phone rang, the remote party asked for the Marketing Manager.

Sweet, I’ll just put him on for you, and the phone shortly later got a lot of dial tones and some cheeky laughs from my little one.

Let me know if your pitch to the marketing manager was successful. I doubt you’ll be getting a sale though.

Anyway, back to it, Bigpond call me, they’ll get similar treatment. They want to mislead customers, that’s fine, I’ll do whatever I can to delay and reduce the results of that misleading.

You know, the reason Australia has such low ratings on OECD, etc, for Broadband speeds? One guess?
The obvious. Many of the signed up customers have been scammed by Bigpond into a 2 year contract with 256k speed.

That’s why we have “disgraceful” broadband services.

It’s not due to a required upgrade to the network.
It’s not due to any other issues, except for one key issue. Telstra’s misleading marketing. They need to come clean. You don’t get, and cannot get 200Mb downloads on the plan. They count uploads, so you simply cannot get 200Mb downloads with 0Mb uploads. To say that you can receive that is deliberate deception of customers. To describe 200Mb as a lot of data to customers is also a deliberate deception.

To try and pass the blame instead of accepting your own misleading marketing as the reason broadband services when compared internationally as a disgrace, is also disgraceful.

Telstra is the disgrace here.

When Murdoch claimed Australian Broadband is a disgrace, the attack should have been clearly targetted at Telstra, the responsible party for it reaching disgraceful levels.

Enjoy!

EDIT: Updated to clarify intended meaning of “the scum” – These are the sales staff who tell those that they call, that the plans include “X amount of downloads” – when clearly they don’t as they count upload data.