Having run out of blank A4 paper and needing to print something, I decided “Hey, I’ve got 24 sheets, I’ll print this 40 page document double-sided!”
Why is it so difficult for me to get my head around how to do this? There are many ways I could screw up – pages back to front (printing odd and even pages on the same side), pages upside down (printing odd pages in one direction, and even upside down on the back), printing the odd pages in order, but the even pages in reverse order (the first sheet having page 1 on the front, and page 39 on the back), offsetting the pages by one sheet…
I only misprinted four pages. I call this a success 🙂
Month: March 2011
Virgin Media in stealth Ofcom marketing tactic
The BBC are reporting that “Ofcom wants to ban misleading broadband speed ads”.
All well and good, but marketing a service as “up to 24Mbps” makes many people believe they will about 24Mbps. In reality, there is negative correlation between the length of a phone line and the speed you’ll get from ADSL. Is there a widespread user perception problem, or is it just down to marketing? (Remember the “Up to 50% off!” adverts you see on the high street – you may not realise that everything may be 10% off apart from one item which is discounted by 50%…)
What bothers me is that Ofcom claim Virgin Media – who provide a much different service using a wholly different technology – provide speeds much closer to their “up to” figures. This is wholly wrong – Ofcom are not comparing apples with apples. Virgin Media’s service is dissimilar to ADSL, with more equipment closer to users’ locations, and fewer limits on the amount of power they can shove down a piece of co-axial cable.
The BBC article goes further to make it look like your ISP has a lot to do with your “broadband speed”. The reality is that all ISPs using BT Wholesale’s DSL infrastructure for a phone line will get about the same speeds across that line to the exchange, but depending on the level of oversubscription and contention in their network, their customers may not reach that speed.
Is this clever stealth marketing from Virgin Media? Have Ofcom forgotten that Virgin are advertising their service as “fibre-optic broadband”, when it’s really a fibre-optic backbone and copper cabling to your house? Fibre is not broadband – it’s a very narrow, specific range of frequencies. Have BT, who are advertising their “fibre to the cabinet” (FTTC) service as “Infinity”, forgotten that there is no number greater than infinity, and they’ve just shot themselves in the foot marketing-wise?