Having a Mother of a Day

David Heath
Sunday, 27 April 2008 19:38

Business IT - Networking

There’s a similar story from New Zealand where Xtra, the country’s leading ISP (which is owned by Telecom NZ) advertised a number of statements later considered by the Commerce Commission to be misleading: "Xtra Broadband is about to be unleashed!", "unlimited data usage and all the internet you can handle" and "maximum speed internet."  Customers complaining to the Commission said that in essence, none of these statements were true.

To some extent, ISPs are victims of their war with other ISPs to retain and gain customers.  They offer possibly outlandish deals in the hope they won’t be found out: that, should every customer take advantage of the access promised, the ISP simply cannot provide the service.

The problem is not limited to these isolated cases.  Many ISPs in the US, Comcast for instance have publicly admitted that their network was not built to provide the full level of access that appears to be promised to the users.

If you think about it, this is not fraud of any kind, it’s not even stupidity.  It’s simply gambling (and that’s something Mr Packer surely ought to know something about).  The ISPs have gambled on a number of aspects of their business – that the average user will use considerably less than the bandwidth they’ve purchased; that there won’t be some kind of tipping-point that suddenly changes the usage landscape; and that no-one will notice the problem.

Now that the second problem (which has impacted the first) has occurred and in turn suddenly brought the third into play, the ISPs are crying poor – it just HAS to be someone else’s fault.  How dare someone start providing content which everyone wants!

It’s a couple of weeks early, but for ISPs around the world, Mother’s Day has arrived, and it’s going to last much longer than just one Sunday in May.