Why Are BT Adverts Misleading? - 21/1/10
Posted by Kevin Box on Fri, Jan 21, 2011 @ 04:23 AM
BT seems to be obsessed with making misleading claims.
Take for instance their headline for BT Enhanced Hosted VoIP – it 
claims from £5.00 per month. To get the £5.00 a month rate you have to pay a higher rate for a year before it drops down to this rate. Then of course you have to pay for a BT line, a BT broadband connection with a BT monthly line rental plus any call charges. So before you can make a phone call you will have to pay about £40 a month. The claim of £5 is like saying you can drink the bottom half of your pint of beer for free providing you pay £5.00 for the top half. Not actually wrong but very misleading. You can’t actually start to pay your £40 a month or so until you have paid all of the set up charges that BT want to charge. Then of course if you actually want a phone- you have to buy a BT Falcon phone– appropriately named after a bird of prey. Even here it’s misleading it’s a re-badged Cisco phone really.
Take for example their latest campaign 2 million wifi hotspots from BT. The reality is that when you sign up for a BT broadband you get a home hub which is a wifi hotspot using your electricity. You then broadcast a proportion of that wifi to any Tom Dick or Harry that happens to want a slow public wifi connection. This would be noble gesture on your part if you realised you were doing it. Looked at from the other point of view Tom Dick and Harry get to share a 256K broadband signal between them provided the walls of your house aren’t too thick.
I don’t understand why they have to hide behind misleading claims – why not simply tell it as it is. I am sure they would get a lot more trust that way.
Written by David Hill, Chairman, Cloudnet
The business phone benefits of VoIP lie behind the astronomical growth of the industry. In summary these are:
• Free calls within the network
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