BBC Watchdog broadband survey ‘misleading’
March 22, 2007 by go broadband
According to Brightview (owener of Global Internet, Waitrose & Madasasfish broadband), the BBC Watchdog broadband survey* mislead viewers. The broadband company argues that the surver focused too heavily on the number of votes cast about a broadband provider, not the relative satisfaction of the various broadband supplier’s customers.
BBC watchdog cited as receiving the largest number of positive votes. However, Brightview said Watchdog failed to point out that BT also had the third highest number of dissatisfied customers.
Brightview said that the broadband survey
“doesn’t show how good BT’s broadband service is; it just shows how big BT is. Only 64 percent of the BT customers who voted were actually satisfied with their broadband service, ranking BT a lowly 20th out of the 29 providers in the survey,”
Global Internet (95 percent), Waitrose (94 percent) and Madasafish (91 percent) – all Brightview-backed ISPs – took three of the top four spots for customer satisfaction. Zen Internet (93 percent) was also in the top four, while Metronet (90 percent) came fifth.
David Laurie, chief executive of Brightview, said:
“Basing the programme’s results on volume of voters was the supreme example of the BBC’s ineptitude at managing a very important survey on broadband providers. It is Watchdog’s duty to inform the consumer, but by telling viewers that the ‘best’ provider of broadband also features as one of the worst, it only confused the issue and failed to make use of some valuable consumer data.
“The BBC’s ridiculous handling of the survey did nothing to reflect customer opinion, and misled consumers into believing that a provider which achieved a customer satisfaction significantly below average is the best.”
* Over 50,000 broadband user’s took part in the Watchdog broadband customer satisfaction survey.
Pipex broadband up for sale
March 21, 2007 by go broadband
Well the number of UK households connected to the internet appears to be growing month on month. According to the latest stats from the government office of statistics, broadband usage is now up to 57% ( National Office of Statistics & lies – latest internet access figures).
And yet oddly while the number of UK households subscribing to broadband seems to be up, then number of companies supplying broadband seems to be shrinking. UK Broadband provider Pipex is now up for sale and the bidding war is intense.
It seems that the latest company having a look at Pipex to buy is Virgin media. Virgin media as a new business is only 2-3 months old following the merger of NTL and Telewest into the Virgin brand. Both had shocking customer service so the marketing bods thought that under the Virgin banner they could convince their existing broadband customers to stick with Virgin while they sort through the problems of NTL and Telewest broadband.
It would intially seem odd that Virgin media would be looking to buy Pipex broadband before it has got its own house in order but there is a BIGGER picture. Only Virgin media and SKY can truly dominate in the new market paradigm of product bundling (broadband, telephone, and TV) and therefore will be looking to buy up the whole of the UK broadband market place. BT and the CarphoneWhareHouse could get a look in (they are both big after-all) but Virgin and Sky are the one’s to keep an eye on long-term.
We’ll keep track on the who’s going to get to buy Pipex. It might take a few weeks.
Amazing Pipex is up for sale really considering they themselves have been on the acquisition war-path over the last 18 months, buying up all the little broadband providers. It seems that only large broadband providers will survive in the long-run.
Broadband survey results – BBC Watchdog
March 21, 2007 by go broadband
BBC Watchdog this evening published the results of its Broadband survey.
It ran the survey following complaints from the public surrounding poor customer service, reliability, and value for money. Interesting to note that the biggest player of them all – BT – ranked so well. They might be damned expensive but they do offer a easy to use service with great customer service and ease of broadand cancellation or migration.
The results of the survey are as follows:
THE BEST BROADBAND PROVIDERS (by number of votes *)
* There is a huge scew towards the big players in both the ‘best’ and ‘worst’ tables and the same broadband providers will appear in both lists.
[This table lists - in order of the total number of votes cast - the companies that, overall, viewers who took part in the survey were most happy with. It was calculated by adding together the 'satisfied' and 'extremely satisfied' ratings in each of the five categories. This total is the number listed after each company's name.]
| Based on sum of 3s & 4s (satisfied, extremely satisfied) |
| 1. BT – 18,862 |
| 2. Virgin – 17,881 |
| 3. AOL Europe -16,977 |
| 4. Tiscali – 11,973 |
| 5. TalkTalk -10,802 |
| 6. NTL – 10,399 |
| 7. Orange – 9,036 |
| 8. Telewest – 8,062 |
| 9. Sky – 6,202 |
| 10. Pipex – 5,772 |
| 11. Plusnet – 5,014 |
| 12. Zen – 4,742 |
| 13. Eclipse – 2,781 |
| 14. Demon – 2,515 |
| 15. Tesco – 2,216 |
| 16. Freedom2Surf – 2,160 |
| 17. Madasafish – 2,031 |
| 18. Nildram – 1,619 |
| 19. Waitrose – 1,308 |
| 20. Bulldog – 1,162 |
| 21. Supanet – 1,131 |
| 22. UK_Online – 987 |
| 23. ToucanSurf – 895 |
| 24. One.Tel – 585 |
| 25. Homecall – 528 |
| 26. Force 9 – 518 |
| 27. Metronet – 426 |
| 28. Biscit – 258 |
| 29. Global – 166 |
THE WORST BROADBAND PROVIDERS (by number of votes
This table lists – in order of the total number of votes cast – the companies that, overall, viewers who took part in the survey were least happy with. It was calculated by adding together the ‘extremely dissatisfied’ and ‘dissatisfied’ ratings in each of the five categories. This total is the number listed after each company’s name.
| Based on sum of 1s & 2s (extremely dissatisfied, dissatisfied) |
| 1. Orange – 12,313 |
| 2. TalkTalk – 11,944 |
| 3. BT – 10,669 |
| 4. Tiscali – 10,412 |
| 5. AOL Europe – 7,500 |
| 6. Sky – 6,525 |
| 7. Virgin – 6,306 |
| 8. Pipex – 4,083 |
| 9. NTL – 3,753 |
| 10. Plusnet – 2,109 |
| 11. Bulldog – 1985 |
| 12. Telewest – 1373 |
| 13. Biscit – 883 |
| 14. Eclipse – 869 |
| 15. ToucanSurf – 811 |
| 16. Demon – 738 |
| 17. Tesco – 555 |
| 18. Freedom2Surf – 469 |
| 19. UK_Online – 432 |
| 20. Supanet – 431 |
| 21. Zen – 371 |
| 22. Homecall – 326 |
| 23. One.Tel – 305 |
| 24. Force 9 – 229 |
| 25. Nildram – 256 |
| 26. Madasafish – 190 |
| 27. Waitrose – 80 |
| 28. Metronet – 47 |
| 29. Global – 8 |
Broadband Experiment: How to get your brand-new broadband domain indexed on Google
March 20, 2007 by go broadband
Now this should be interesting. This is going to be a Google indexing test.
I had read somewhere recently about a quick fire way to get a newly registered domain indexed on Google. The article “How to get your website indexed on Google” suggested that if you were having trouble to get a new domain indexed on Google – eg. my new one, ‘go broadband’ – then you should set up a free blog on something like blogger.
You should then proceed to make a few posts about broadband over the period of a few days and wait for Google to find you new broadband blog. The Google robots should in theory wonder through the blogger index, find your broadband blog and then index the sites it finds you linking out to.
So here is my first test.
I have put some external links out to some broadband sites that I know are already indexed by Google and will then simply check their inbound referalls to see if this broadband blog gets indexed (probably a bit Naive considering Google only shows a small proportion of the inbound links to a website).
With any luck, if this broadband blog gets indexed and the sites I am linking to get indexed as well then there is no reason why the following domain shouldn’t get sucked up by Google too > hopefully under a keyword phrase to with comparing UK broadband providers. If that doesn’t work then we’ll try something else to help get me indexed.
Here’s hoping. I’ll post as soon as I get picked up. How exciting.
Broadband setup
March 20, 2007 by go broadband
Well the Go-broadband blog is now up and running. Pretty straight-forward to edit within the pre-configured options.
If anyone sees this then please post a reply so I can find out how the post comments part works.
Thank-you
Go Broadband is … GO
March 20, 2007 by go broadband
Welcome.
This is the first post of ‘Go broadband’ on blogspot.
The blog will be here at http://gobroadband.blogspot.com until I have fully tweaked the configurations of Blogger.
This site will move to live on http://www.go-broadband.co.uk
Thank you for dropping by.