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BT has been ticked off for running a campaign claiming to have the UK's "most powerful" broadband, almost two years after it was hauled before the ad industry watchdog over the same issue.
Back in June 2017, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) rapped the former state monopoly on the knuckles for "misleading" and "inaccurate" boasts that its Smart Hub provided a "stronger signal" than all of its competitors. BT was clearly undeterred by the ASA.
Fast-forward to the here and now and the gummy-mouthed watchdog received a complaint from Virgin Media – itself no stranger to criticism about its own campaigns – about two BT promos: one for consumers and one for businesses.
The first, aimed at households, included the claim "UK's most powerful Wi-Fi vs major broadband providers" as part of the Unlimited Infinity bundle. The second made the same claim but was aimed at businesses via the BT Business Smart Hub.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by ledow on Monday March 04 2019, @02:11PM
Wouldn't matter if they had 50 antennae on the one box, really. There's a limit to the power output from such a device (otherwise everyone would just put a million antennae in, each at 5W, and you'd end up with a 5 million Watt transmitter in everyone's home which would end in anarchy.
An old Draytek router of mine (with "just" three antennae) gives me complete coverage throughout not only a three-bed house, plus outside in the front and back gardens, but my car picks up the wifi before I even get near the house.
Hell, I can see networks which triangulate using wifi-scanning apps as being 5-6 houses away.
The BT routers, by comparison, are always absolute junk. Whenever I deploy a business line we're told we "must" use them, so we bin them on day one because they're just that good. I think we keep one around just in case the service lines ever demand we use it.
And that's before you even get close to "real" wifi units that are deployed in businesses and the like - which tend to be boring square boxes with no visible antennae at all, but have ranges so huge that I've just had to block half the neighbourhood around one of our sites because they were all jumping on our guest wifi.
BT routers are junk compared to anything with a real price-tag, and don't fare well against any non-BT box such as supplied by the majority of ISPs. Hell, a NetGear WRT45G still kicks their backside most of the time, and that's two technologies old (n and ac).