Phil’s Diary - [Blog @ http://www.philsdiary.net/]
My ISP, Plus.net are getting themselves into a bit of PR trouble at the moment.
A few weeks back they announced that from April all their customers would be able to upgrade to BT’s new “as fast as you can go” product, free of charge. In that same email they announce their new fair usage policy.
There was lots of talk at the time about how introducing what is in effect a bandwidth cap was changing the terms and conditions and in some cases even false advertising to begin with.
Plus.net said that the terms and conditions had always stated they could impose these conditions etc. etc. It didn’t go down well as you can imagine, but the deal was sweetened a little by the free speed upgrades.
Except that in the last few days it’s become apparent that BT aren’t intending to roll out these free speed upgrades particularly quickly, so “From April”, could actually be next year some time.
As you can imagine those people who were a bit miffed at the new usage policy before are now really quite cheesed off.
But what makes things quite a lot worse is the stance being taken by Plus.net. Rather than own up and say, we were wrong, we’re relying on BT and they changed their minds, or similar. We’ve had discussions like “From April, means it could be any time after April”, and “In conjunction with, doesn’t mean the two have to happen at the same time” and “We never promised that your line upgrade would happen straight away”.
Personally I think that attitude stinks. Their initial product announcement was obviously sent out as a bit of PR, it’s headed “Great news! Free speed upgrades to all PlusNet customers”. So now when it’s obvious that their PR spin isn’t quite going to work out as they intended, rather than trying to wriggle out of things by chewing over the wording of the announcement, I think they should just stand up, say “hey, we screwed up”, and get on with it.
Posted by Phil on March 05, 2005 08:56 AM | Categories: Thoughts
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Reminds me a bit of Tiscali here.
They offered a 'no limits' broadband option via ADSL. Now ADSL is actually a Belgacom service (the old telco) and it has bandwith limitations. Of course people complained to Tiscaly that they didn't actually get the 'no limits' service. The first reaction from Tiscali was "well we don't limit the service so don't complain to us".
A week or so later they -silently- dropped the no-limits offer.
Posted by: sjon at March 7, 2005 7:26 AM