The broadband speed fiasco: how slow was your connection?

Ofcom’s exposé is as damning as it is accurate. It implies a culture of collusion, evasiveness and conceit towards the customer; it shows scant regard for the truth; and it reveals a long history of institutionalised poor practice. Misleading claims by ISPs have now tarred the whole sector with a shameful brush of cheating consumers, giving the wider web industry’s credibility a real knock back.

Inside the industry it left a bitter taste in the mouths of many web media groups who now know why the broadband experience they’d been carefully crafting for their consumers was far from the one actually watched. The actions of ISPs have chipped away at the business model of web publishers whose broadband focus is key for the competition of the PC screen over the TV. In Westminster it will have been even more uncomfortable, embarrassing those who are marketing Britain as the digital leading edge; the place of digital opportunity for the creative and content industries. The ISPs succeeded in letting all of us down.

And that’s why Ofcom and the ASA should act together - both swiftly and deeply – with a focus on three key areas:

The history of false claims among the providers should be exposed so consumers can think again about the brands they’ve been trusting and giving money to. Consumers can then make up their own mind by seeing the real picture.

A ‘typical average speed’ metric should become compulsory in all marketing. The finance and motoring industries have good precedents for this and the approach is easy for consumers to understand. Given the ISPs behaviour, it should be based on an independent auditor working to a single methodology.

Greater transparency should become standard with contention ratios (the number of devices sharing a connection) becoming public and easy to compare. Capacity bottlenecks should be reported openly on customer service pages maintained by each ISP. All of this should be reported back to Ofcom in a structured quarterly way.

Only this type of action will restore public confidence in the web’s plumbing, and industry confidence in the delivery of entertainment and services. In making false claims about connection speeds, the ISPs have succeeded in the ultimate own goal of losing the confidence of government, just as government’s engagement becomes key in overcoming the capacity constraints of an internet centric society. An apology to their customers about the past may be asking too much, but a new way forward is the only option for the future.

Danny Meadows-Klue has lectured on digital marketing analytics for over a decade, run workshops at the eMetrics summit, chaired UK and European industry taskforces to create and police the metrics for campaign measurement, and designed the Web Analytics Academy coaching programme. Contact him on Danny@DigitalStrategyConsulting.com or http://uk.linkedin.com/in/dannymeadowsklue