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Monday, March 29, 2010

Ofcom Mystery Shopper test reveals shambles of ISP sales advice to consumers

Its been anonymized to protect the guilty but still pretty damning:
'almost half (42 per cent) of these shoppers had to prompt providers for their speed late in the sales process. In addition, three quarters (74 per cent) of mystery shoppers were not informed that their actual speed was likely to be below their maximum line speed. The research also showed that shoppers often received a wide variety of different estimates of the maximum line speed from different ISPs for the same line.
Having investigated the issue further, Ofcom has found that ISPs use different methods for calculating and presenting such line speed information.Some ISPs also often gave the estimate for the maximum line speed in the form of a wide range (such as 10-20Mbit/s) which could lead customers to expect a much higher speed than they actually receive. Ofcom is now proposing to tighten the Code to address these issues in order to ensure that consumers are given adequate information about their broadband service when making purchasing decisions.'

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