Virgin media have been given a slap on the wrist by the Advertising Standards Authority because they overstated broadband speeds in adverts.

I understand when it comes to advertising there has to be small print saying people won’t always receive the top speed mentioned depending on time of day, quality of line, etc. but I’m not sure why it isn’t followed through to fair trading after you sign up.

There is a larger issue here altogether meaning that ISPs are misselling broadband entirely. If I get a 8Mb/sec line I expect to get close to that stated speed at some point in the day. If it never gets above 2Mb/sec surely I should be charged the cost of a 2Mb/sec line? OK there are various factors that effect this especially line quality when it comes to ADSL. However I believe that when you are setting up a new broadband connection the ISP should do a line test and provide you with a cost, a maximum speed and a minimum speed. This way it is totally transparent to the customer and if there are problems they have a point where they can complain they are not receiving an adequate service.

I’ve experienced speeds of 256Kb/sec on a 8Mb/sec connection, only 3% of the speed sold, and been told by BT nothing is wrong. Clearly they were under-performing here but I had no way of complaining as there was no technical fault to speak of. Does this sound right to you?

Yes there are many variable factors when providing broadband but these could be taken into account and the contract amended accordingly.

In addition this also brings up the subject of net neutrality - should broadband providers be able to limit bandwidth according to agreements they have with content providers? No! If I pay for 8Mb/sec I pay for 8Mb/sec to every location on the net I choose! Underinvestment in your infrastructure is not a reason to try and screw over your customers to try avoid needed upgrades.

It’s about time the whole issue of selling broadband should be tightened up.

Interesting figures from some Google commissioned research which I found thanks to a quick post on the Online Journalism Blog.

It shows that offline advertising leads to online further research of a product in 67% of cases.

I posted about the relationship of online advertising to offline sales a while ago and it shows the crossover between online and offline Worlds should not be underestimated.

Of course a lot of companies still think the two are pretty much unrelated and therefore don’t follow through all the possible tracking opportunities available. How simple is it to create a campaign specific URL for each offline campaign that can then be linked into a websites stats? Extremely simple and should really be second nature by now.

After all the predictions of a 10% drop in profits for Google for Q1 of 2008 they blew everyone out of the water with a 30% increase in profits over 2007.

With all the worries of an impending recession this is perhaps encouraging for online businesses. I’m one of the people that actually thinks a recession may be good for Internet service companies (or at least should be seen as an opportunity).

During a recession every penny will be tight for companies and therefore people have to prove success of various campaigns. Online campaigns can be tracked easily so a ROI can be calculated and relatively speaking online advertising and communication is cheap in comparison to traditional methods.

So if we do have to start watching the pennies very closely I think a hard working website and online strategy is going to more important for a business than ever.