If we’re arse-baringly honest about it, the BT ads featuring manchild Kris Marshall getting some dreary MILF up the duff were about as stimulating as a handjob from Tattoo in Fantasy Island. Cringing dialogue counterpointed by advertising messages so obvious they caused blunt force trauma (”FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PLEASE USE YOUR HOME LANDLINE”) left the audience feeling like they’d watched 30 seconds of milk curdling.

But where to next? How can BT possibly top an improbably poor advertising campaign that will fade from the memory quicker than Steve Brookstein? With this:

Avid Bitterwallet reader Justin gets enough crap shovelled through his door, without the need for scummy faux flyers that smack of desperation: “After their online badger-bating they’ve now stooped to paper snail-mail shots that approximate broadband to a cat.” Stay classy, BT. And for the love of sweet baby Jesus, stop giving money to Kris Marshall.

And so once more, The Daily Mail has been found guilty of breaking advertising rules and telling consumers a porkie or two. Specifically, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has found the newspaper in breach of no less than six regulations and declared the promotion to be misleading and untruthful. Boom.

If you want to read the ASA’s report for yourself, you’ll find it here. Essentially the paper offered cheap family holidays, and enticed readers to apply with big shiny headlines, hiding away the pertinent detail in very small print, as well as failing to mention that availability of the holidays was heavily restricted at peak times. There were other misdemeanours but you get the idea; the ASA upheld three separate complaints.

So given the serious nature of the matter, in that consumers were thoroughly misled by the promotion, what decisive action has the ASA taken against the paper?

“The promotion must not appear again in its current form.”

Here’s the thing. The promotion won’t appear in its current form again – not by virtue of the Daily Mail having a sudden fit of morals and making good on its misleading behaviour, but by virtue of the linear passage of time. The promotion is done, finished with – it won’t happen in its current form again, not because of the ASA’s adjudication, but because a time machine would be required for the same advert with the same particulars to run once more.

The truth is the same companies continue to break the advertising rules, over and over, and as soon as complaints are upheld, they simply tweak the message and do it all over again. This is the fifth time that The Mail and The Mail on Sunday have had complaints upheld this year alone. BT, another company in the headlines today for bending the rules concerning broadband speeds, has been found in breach of the ASA regulations no less than a dozen times in just over two years.

While the ASA likes to think that upheld complaints serves as an example to other advertisers, it’s fair to suggest their actions can never deter those companies with large marketing budgets. They can sustain a misleading advertising message that far outweighs a single day of bad press. Advertising works through repetition of the message, through frequency – so it’s the advertiser that’ll always win a confrontation with the ASA. Every time.

All the ASA can do is request that other bodies consider punishing offenders. For example:

“For misleading or unfair advertising, if an advertiser refuses to comply with the ASA, then the ASA Chief Executive is able to refer the advertiser to the Office of Fair Trading for legal proceedings.

“Such referrals are rarely necessary, as most advertisers prefer to resolve the matter directly with us.”

And how are such matters resolved with the ASA? By the advertiser promising not to run the same advert again. Oh. Only Ryanair seems to have been sent to the OFT for bad behaviour, while plenty of others continue misleading consumers with impunity.

“Our aim at the ASA is to ensure that consumers do not just enjoy the ads they see, but they can trust them too.”

Except you can’t trust them, can you? Ultimately it seems that any advertiser can say what they want, as often as they want, because advertising can deliver a misleading message unchallenged for weeks, and the ASA can only ever limply tackle it with a day of bad press.

BT have said that they’re going to increase call charges by 10% and its monthly line rental by 50p from the beginning of October. Most customers will have this confirmed later in the week in a letter that they won’t read.

The cost of connecting a call will go up from 9.9 pence to 10.9p. The daytime rate rises from 5.9p to 6.4p a minute. Feel free to download Skype or send someone an Tweet or something if you’re outraged by this.

BT reckon that this amounts to an increase of 1p a day because the average customer makes only 80 seconds of daytime in a day. More than half of customers subscribe to inclusive packages, so they won’t notice it at all.

It said “calling plans enable customers to avoid the set-up fee and charges for most calls altogether”.

From October, BT customers will pay a landline rental charge of £13.29 a month, or £12.04 if they receive their bills by e-mail.

If you want cheaper rates, then this is price increase is designed to get people to sign up to longer-term contracts and special bundled packages.

BT said it would be happy to discuss inclusive packages to reduce bills or different payment options, such as inclusive packages. You’ll just have to go on-hold for a million hours first.

[BBC]

BT’s unrealistic, hateful  family, featuring Kris ‘Whoops! There goes the career! Marshall and Esther ‘Who?’ Hall, are going to be leaving our screens very shortly and BT are giving us all the chance to decide how the ’storyline’ is concluded.

Will there be a vote for public flogging or an incident with a tree-shredder? Probably not.

What we’ll get is a bunch of commercials, made by someone who had something to do with Cold Feet, which will start airing on Saturday which will direct us to a website where we can vote for one of two possible endings that will be shown in late August.

Apparently, lead up to the end involves something to do with a problem with the mum of the family which will be hinted at in an instant messaging session between her teenage son and Adam. Sounds confusing. And shit.

“The strand of ads we are doing at the moment are all about human interaction and human relationships [facilitated by BT products] and we thought about building the connection by getting people involved in the story of the campaign itself,” said Matthew Dearden to the Guardian, marketing director for BT Retail.

If you’re simple in the head and want to see the commercial early, then you can join some Facebook group and see it and start voting on the choice of two rather boring endings. I don’t imagine we’ll be getting anything like the surprise appearance of Vic and Bob at the close of the ‘Papa, Nicole’ commercials.

Rumour has it that it won’t be a chocolate box ending, so maybe one of ‘Adam’s’ friends who have been irritated by him showing off with his fast broadband connection will bludgeon him to death with a router on his wedding day before strangling the rest of the family with the lead from a Bakelite BT phone.

The Digital Economy Act, passed days before Parliament was dissolved for the General Election, was and still is regarded as something of a sow’s ear. Deliberately rushed through with little time to be debated, passed into law by MPs who didn’t necessarily understand what they were voting on, nobody seemed particularly happy with the outcome.

The more questionable aspects of the Act included proposals to force ISPs to disconnect illegal file-sharers and give copyright holders the power to block access to websites hosting illegal content.

Now BT and TalkTalk to joined together to seek a judicial review of the Act, to clarify its legality before it’s implemented next year. And both companies talk a good game, stating that their concerns are for their customers and their “basic rights and freedoms”. Says Charles Dunstone, chairman of TalkTalk:

“The Digital Economy Act’s measures will cost the UK hundreds of millions and many people believe they are unfair, unwarranted and won’t work. Innocent broadband customers will suffer and citizens will have their privacy invaded.”

BT whistle a very similar tune – this from Gavin Patterson, chief executive of BT Retail: “We feel we have no choice. We have to do this for our customers.”

Hooray for the big guys, standing up for the man on the stree- sorry, what’s that? Of course, the devil is very much in the detail; as it stands the Act specifies that only ISPs with more than 400,000 customers must take action against customers, so rather than this being all about the consumer, this fight is actually about protecting their profits:

Andrew Heaney, executive director of TalkTalk, told the BBC: “It means we could have huge swathes of customers moving to smaller ISPs to avoid detection.”

And there we are . Nobody would have cared if they’d said they were challenging the Act in the interests of self-preservation. Always best to get your story straight before talking to the press.

BT have launched a package which will allow you, dear armchair coach, to hurl abuse at professional sportsmen who know more about playing football than you do for as little as £6.99 a month (on top of the basic monthly subscription) with a cheap Sky Sports package.

You can get Sky Sports 1 for £6.99 a month or both Sky Sports 1 and 2 for £11.99. Of course, you have to sign up to other stuff like broadband and telephone for a minimum of two years, but still, the point is, this is cheaper than Sky and Virgin’s packages.

That said, be aware that, if you’re going for the BT package, customers will have to pay set-up charges of £60.

It seems to work out pretty well though as all that considered, a BT basic bundle that includes both Sky Sports channels and ESPN works out around £100 cheaper in the first year than the other options.

“With first year cost savings of over £100, BT has priced its Sky Sports 1 and 2 with ESPN offering to warrant serious consideration from anyone looking to bundle their TV with broadband and phone,” says Michael Phillips of Digitalchoices.co.uk. “If recent reports are true about Sky looking to increase its own channel pricing, then BT’s new offering could look even more compelling.”

In response to this, a clearly disgruntled Sky have bafflingly decided to raise prices for their sports channels, coming to effect in Autumn. Presumably, this is a sly way of raising the wholesale costs for BT. However, with potentially increased customers, BT may well be happy to run the project at a loss.

The interesting thing is seeing what people want. Most only want a Sky package for the football coverage, so they presumably won’t mind ditching Sky 1 and Sky Movies. The fight is on and, knowing Murdoch, this could get very ugly indeed. We can only hope.

[Guardian]

BT can be dead-eyed and unsympathetic at the best of times. Like this week for example when they cut-off my internet and phone because I’d not paid a bill they hadn’t sent me.

Still, at least they didn’t quote a figure so preposterous that it made me spray my innards all over the house. Yep, BT quoted a pensioner a whopping £150,000 to install broadband at her house in rural Wales, according to The Reg.

Beverley McCartney, who lives in Salem, Carmarthenshire, was contacted by BT last week and after telling her that they couldn’t connect her home, they worked out that they actually could, and would do it for the bargain price of £129,613.54 plus VAT. As a kind gesture, BT offered to contribute £8,000.

A shocked Mrs McCartney said: “I phoned BT and said surely this is a typing error and the girl said, ‘No, there’s been no mistake, other people have had bills for much more than this.’”

Other houses in Salem, which is three miles outside Llandeilo, do have broadband, so the village isn’t classified as a “not-spot” which would qualify for a Welsh Assembly subsidy.

BT spokesman Chris Orum defended the quote. “If it’s just one individual person and it requires upgrading the network for one person, no company would cover that,” he said.

This isn't it

Tablet computing is here to stay – it must be true because those renowned pioneers of white-hot technology at BT are getting involved. They’ve unveiled a new tablet device that they say is designed ONLY for the home. Presumably if it hits fresh air it’ll melt or something.

BT are saying that it’ll be a touchscreen version of a landline phone, with a built-in speaker and microphone as well as Bluetooth options, and it will also include voicemail, emailing and texting capabilities. There’ll even be video messaging, like in the future and that.

If that wasn’t enough (it wasn’t) the thing will also have news and weather apps. Wow – it sounds fucking IMMENSE (although in truth, sizewise, it’ll be in between an iPod Touch and an iPad.)

Currently nameless and priceless, BT say they’ll reveal more information about this housebound little curio later in the year. Presumably when they’ve come up with some more stuff that it can do…

What do we know about Rutland? It’s small. So small is tiny ol’ Rutland that the motto is Multum In Parvo which means “much in little” – most of Rutland is either villages or water.

One lot of villagers have collectively stuck two fingers up at British Telecom because, quite simply, the residents didn’t feel like they were pulling enough weight. Now, the people that live in Lyddington, Rutland, are together celebrating the arrival of some half decent broadband after they set up their very own telco!

After waiting for BT to get their thumbs from up their arses, 200 (plus) households raised £37,000 for the costs of installing fully unbundled broadband connections. This has seen speeds jumping up to 25 Mbps from a measly 0.5 Mbps.

“We found that any company could do, on a smaller scale, what Carphone Warehouse has done and take over BT’s network,” said Dr David Lewis, managing director of Rutland Telecom. They asked Openreach, the BT spin-off that has responsibility for the UK’s telephone network, to supply fibre-optic cable to a street cabinet in the village.

“For the first time in UK telecommunications history the telephone lines of customers are completely cut off from the local BT exchange,” said Rutland Telecom director Mark Melluish.

Rutland Telecom is getting ready for the grand opening today. If you’re thinking of popping along, be warned that the nearest public toilet is in Uppingham and adds: “We are grateful to Mr & Mrs Knapp of No. 78 Main Street for making their garden available for this event – the garden is directly behind the cabinet.”

How great is that?

[BBC / The Register]

Football invariably won’t be coming home during the World Cup this summer – you’ll have to settle for the Quarter Finals, or similar – but it is about to get cheaper if you watch it anywhere other than with a Sky subscription. Ofcom has today told Sky to reduce the amount it charges other broadcasters to offer Sky Sports – the likes of Virgin Media and BT – by nearly a quarter.

The Murdoch empire has been told to reduce the wholesale price at which it sells Sky Sports 1 and Sky Sports 2 from the current £13.88 to £10.63 per subscriber per month. Over a year, it would mean a saving for the customer on a bundled TV package of around £24. Of course Sky are appealing the decision, so it’s not a done deal just yet; even if the deal does go through, it wouldn’t stop Sky juggling its schedules and perhaps moving key sporting events to other premium channels or pay-per-view.

The regulators are also about to go after Sky concerning their restriction of premium movie rights, because it has a knock-on effect for the subscription video-on-demand market. Also bundled in with the decision, Ofcom gave Sky permission to resurrect Picnic, Sky’s Pay TV service for Freeview. That would mean the end of Sky’s free channels on Freeview, replaced with subscription channels. Bah. So Sky will appeal everything except the decisions in their interests, and nothing good comes of it for the consumer. Good work.

[Guardian]

The internet, yesterday

Here’s a big list that might result in a pleasant surprise for you – it’s the next 300 locations that BT will be adding to its fibre network.

The blurb claims that the deployment will bring 40Mbits/sec fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) connections to approximately four millions homes across the country, with work starting in September and running into Summer 2011. In short, you’ll be able to download a picture of a giant before you’ve even thought about doing it. Or something.

BT have added that the super duper new network will be available on an “open, wholesale basis to all companies providing broadband services,” which follows a bit of a spat recently where Ofcom ruled that BT should be doing just that. BT stuck out its mighty tongue and said that it had been doing it anyway and that Ofcom wasn’t the boss of it, even though it is a bit.

Anyway – as we said, the list is here – have a butchers and see if you’re on there…

It’s mobile phone mania at Ofcom, where they’re taking an axe to current policy in the next week. Aiieee! Off with the head of calling mobiles, as Ofcom is set to propose new caps on the price that operators can charge one other as well as fixed line companies. Arrgh! Guts and viscera pour everywhere as the regulator finally looks to shorten the length of time to port numbers between service providers. Of course there’s likely to be nothing but minor flesh wounds suffered by the operators – this is Ofcom after all.

According to the Guardian, cutting the cost of the termination rates – the charges levied by providers on one another – could mean the mobile phone industry losing out on up to £1 billion in revenue. While some of the larger service providers are likely to huff and puff, such a move is currently welcomed by both BT and 3.

As for switching networks with the same number, the EU has already decreed that the process should be hassle-free and take no more than a single working day. Ofcom had been pushing for the process to take no longer than two hours, but acquiesced when the operators got all grumpy with them.

[The Guardian]

Ofcom, the people you usually hear bitching about TV programmes, have unveiled new proposals to encourage the rollout of super-fast broadband across the UK, according to the Beeb.

They’re proposing that BT’s fibre lines are opened up to everyone else (aka rival firms such as Sky and TalkTalk) so that BT don’t have to wipe everyone’s arse all the time and everyone can just crack on with providing their own services to consumers.

Ofcom hopes that this would lead to millions more consumers enjoying speeds of 50 to 100 megabits per second. This idea is basically an old one that BT themselves once employed. BT’s copper telephone network was opened to rival phone and broadband services.

The regulator also think that BT should offer other companies access to their underground ducts and overhead telegraph poles in the hope that this would allow everyone else to build their own fibre networks more cost-effectively.

This is all very mooshy mooshy and BT, wanting to play along as best they can have said that their fibre network was already open to other firms and that it was not being “forced” to provide access.

“BT has already said that it is willing to open its ducts, so the requirement we do so comes as no surprise,” BT added.

“We agree with Ofcom that there are challenges with such access, but we will work with industry to define a suitable product that meets everyone’s needs. Duct access is unlikely to be the ’silver bullet’ to get fibre to the countryside, but all options should be explored.”

How boring was that?

The worst thing about music piracy is the people who look at their online thievery as a political gesture… as striking a blow to an imagined man. If they just said “Everyone likes a freebie don’t they?”, it wouldn’t be half as bad.

However, it has become something of a political hot-potato thanks to governments wading in to try and stop people robbing music. They’re doing this by waving a bit of paper around with DIGITAL ECONOMY BILL IS GONNA GETCHA written on it in permanent marker.

The debate over illegal file-sharing and how to combat it has seen sensible people stood in the middle, abuse and red tape flying over their heads. They must be wishing both parties would just piss-off and die in a bus-shelter or something.

One thing that the majority agree on is that the Digital Economy Bill is a steaming dung-pile which is neither use nor ornament. The latest person to say so is the boss of British Telecom (who isn’t exactly a nice guy, let’s be honest).

BT chief executive, Ian Livingston, says illegal file-sharers should be fined rather than having their accounts cut off. He and other industry figures have written to the Financial Times asking for changes to the bill.

Livingston says plans to suspend internet access for file-sharers goes against natural justice and that, instead, fines or a scrap in court would be much fairer.

He said this alternative approach would “create a fund” and “you get some good, rather than getting some hurt out of people infringing copyright”.

Feel free to point out BT shortcomings in the comments.

[BBC]

A telephone, yesteryear.

Scores of you nominated BT in our recent Worst Company In Britain 2009 competition, and the widely loathed company have just snuck out another reason for you to nominate them at the end of 2010.

From April 1^st, the beginning of the period when customers can make free evening calls will move back an hour, from 6pm to 7pm in a move that is bound to enrage millions of BT customers.

According to The Guardian, the announcement will be tucked away at the bottom of a letter and email sent out to customers this week entitled “Important information about your BT service.” You know, the sort that most of us rarely bother to read. Those who don’t bother to read it will find out all about it post-April when their plumped-up bills arrive full of charges for calls made between 6pm and 7pm.

But we don’t want you to think that BT are a gang of cack-eyed time thieves because they’re not. They’ll be pushing back the free evening call period, which will now end at 7am instead of 6am. Great news for those of us who like to wake up at 6.05am and ring up a chum for a good natter.

In a weak attempt to justify the cash-grabbing move, a BT spokesman blah-di-blahed “We’ve looked into it and 6pm to 7pm is a busy time for calling, but it’s the time when people make short, organisational calls. It’s between 8pm and 9pm when they sit down to have a chat.”

Oh. That’s alright then.