On the broadband information website I run, we provide users with various options to subscribe to e-mails which for example send them reminders each month if they haven’t rated their broadband service provider, weekly news summaries, or notifications of new posts on the forums. Users have always been able to subscribe/unsubscribe from these automatically on the website, but admittedly this was in various parts and not exactly easy.

So, a few months ago we built this generic unsubscribe form which allows users to type in their e-mail address, receive an e-mail with a new link (with a code) which verifies they are the authentic user of the e-mail address, and then they can select what to unsubscribe from, click Unsubscribe and it’s all done from various systems in one go:

thinkbroadband.com – screenshot of ‘unsubscribe’ page

Now you’d think this should stop all the e-mails from users every week after they get our weekly news summary on Monday morning asking to be removed from the list.. Well.. No..

It’s resulted in e-mails like this:

“I want to stay in subscription and would to take the opportunity to thank you for a great and useful service”

“Please DO NOT Unsubscribe Me The Link was Clicked in Error.”

..and so on. Obviously users would only be removed after going through the verification process so most of these people haven’t actually unsubscribed themselves.

Clearly we have something to learn on the user interface front which we’ve not quite tweaked yet

Broadband is becoming the favourite utility of rants. As more and more of the population upgrade to fast always-on Internet connections, we are starting to see more problems arising indicating that the market is maturing. In the late nineties, we had the Campaign for Unmetered Telecommunications that pushed for changes from “per minute” charges to unmetered, so called ‘flat rate’ plans. Broadband has changed all this, and whilst ‘unlimited’ plans exist, there is an increasing move to limits, not in the form of charging but more ways to limit the ability of a small number of individuals to abuse the concept of unlimited.

The reason why unlimited broadband is a problem is rooted in human nature. When there is no cost to an activity, users start behaving in the optimal way which maximises their personal benefit which sometimes translates to ‘downloading the entire Internet’ to their PC (metaphorically speaking). In most other unlimited offers there are some kinds of restrictions. So, if you have an ‘all you can eat’ deal in a restaurant, you are limited by the fact you physically can’t eat more than a certain amount. Unlimited entry to an attraction is also limited by the fact you only have so much leisure time. But, what about broadband? You can leave it downloading whilst you’re at work and asleep.

Say you have ten cars and take up all the parking on the road outside your house.. Your neighbours would start giving you strange looks.. But, do they know that you’re the person hogging the Internet pipes? Bear in mind your ‘broadband neighbours’ aren’t necessarily physically that close to you anyway.

On his Blog, Ashley Highfield argues that we need a Broadband Charter which among other things sets out arguments that service providers should guarantee minimum speeds, not ‘up to’ speeds.

One suggestion Ashley makes is a standard of “high definition broadband” or HD broadband which would help to unify standards. This is something we (I and my colleagues at thinkbroadband.com) have thought about in the context of providing effective comparisons between different packages. The problem is, it’s not easy to come up with specifications which you can’t, as a service provider, work around to drop the cost (and level of service).

I think there is a significant misunderstanding in the general population that broadband is just about speed with suggestions like connection speeds should be 8 meg or higher.. Previously, users used to look just at price.. now it’s price and headline speed. This is just as bad as those shopping for cameras looking just at “how many megapixels will it do?”.

An Internet connection is about a number of factors including actual speeds , latency, packet loss, connection reliability, support all at various times of the week/day as well as financial stability of the operator and much more. Most users could not begin to understand the complexities of what it takes to provide a good service. Someone could offer you an 8 meg service which seems fast, but if you start running VoIP applications through it, you might find the quality isn’t up to it because latency is too high.

My biggest gripe is with those calling for unlimited broadband.. because it shows the clear lack of understanding that costs of providing a service are very much based on how fast you want the service to be and how much it’s used (by time and amount of use).. Why should service providers subsidise some users who want to use 100 times more than the average user? Shouldn’t that cost be borne by the user who does the downloading?

Service providers can do more (admittedly only with help from wholesale operators) to tackle the issue of making users aware of what they are getting, but demanding they provide a financially unsustainable service is no different to expecting to pay £30 a month at BP and receive unlimited fuel.

The recording and movie industries are fighting an uphill battle to tackle the large scale copyright infringement and are now targetting broadband service providers as their previous efforts against end users seem to have backfired.

The main element of this strategy is that suing end-users is bad publicity because the population reacts emotionally to big bad corporates going after the little guy (in many cases, literally, as it’s often children who download pirated material). By making the ISP responsible for enforcing copyrights, they are shifting the blame and anger towards another entity.

Politicians jump on bandwagons without understanding the Internet and are often quick to take sides. Of course software, music and movie piracy, or in fact any other breach of copyright for that matter, is wrong but there are various ways to address this. Firstly, ISPs should accept that they should not be immune from any liability about what happens on their network–They are not there to provide an anonymous facility for illegal activity to take place. If they think for a second that this is a viable long term proposition, they are sorely mistaken as eventually the activities will move into morally outrageous types which will result in speedy and badly thought out legislation.

The concept of a ‘three strikes’ system does have one significant benefit–It removes the element of being sued or criminalised for an activity which is clearly legally unacceptable, but which is so common in society that is is considered only technically wrong, without being morally so (or at least to a degree where it would be seen as something you shouldn’t do–Many will say piracy is wrong and whilst they may feel a bit guilty, they still do it.)

If such a ‘three strikes’ rule is adopted, it should not bar a user from seeking service with another provider (as doing so would be effectively preventing them from playing any part in today’s society which relies on the Internet), and should include an appeals process (with ultimately the rights holder being required to take the individual to court). Also, the rights holders should accept liability for any errors made on their part including consequential losses. This should ensure that the systems are used fairly and equitably.

The record and movie industries really haven’t been good at recognising the Internet’s opportunities, with very few exceptions such as Radiohead’s ‘name your own price’ campaign. The Internet has changed many business models and it is not possible for an industry to exclude itself from these forces forever. Record labels’ days may well be numbered. Similarly, the concept of regions in DVD releases, is outdated and the sooner the industry realises this, and the globalising nature of the Internet, the better.

From time to time I get various kinds of surveys in the post asking me to provide information as to my views on various issues. I tend not to answer most of them, and here is why.

Last year I wrote about the Illusion of Compromise. Marketers always seem to ask the right question to get the answer they want. This can be done by setting the mindset from the outset.

For example, if an opinion pollster were to ask you the question “Would you like the government to raise your taxes?”, there would be two obvious answers: Yes or No. (We’ll ignore the “I don’t know” for this purpose.) Most people will say “no” (at least as long as they feel the question would raise their own tax burden.)

On the basis of this question, we might get the following outcome:

           keep     raise
            |         |
            +-a-------+
           80         20

(where a is the average outcome)

This would suggest that most people were in favour of keeping taxes at the current level. In reality, if we asked the question in a more open way “What would you like the government to do about taxes?” we might see a very different answer:

lower      keep     raise
  |         |         |
  +---b-----+---------+
 70         10        20

(where b is the average outcome)

Now it becomes clear that whilst 20% of people might want higher taxes, the 80% that do not, are not necessarily of the view that they should stay the same–Some of them want lower taxes. In the first case, a compromise outcome may be a small increase in taxes, whilst in the latter it would be a moderate decrease.

As such, always be weary of opinion polls or surveys that come through in the post asking for your opinion on such matters.

Many websites these days have the option to register which in turn gives you access to additional features. The average Internet user is obviously going to either use the same password on most websites (hopefully they would avoid that on their online banking at least) or they will start forgetting passwords. To deal with this problem, many websites offer a password recovery option of some kind.

Quite a few sites ask you for a “memorable question” allowing you to select one of say five. These are usually questions like “What is your favourite colour?”, “What was your favourite subject at school?” or “What was your first school’s name?”. They rarely offer an option of “I don’t believe in silly security questions.”

Unless I happen to have a sophisticated taste in colours, it’s probably not too difficult to find the answer to the above question with a few guesses (probably even fewer if you profile me a bit). Even with the slightly more personal ones, this information is often in the public domain, particularly with the trend in social networking. These types of decisions by website developers make it pointless for me to use a ‘strong’ password since it is too easy to bypass.

There has recently been quite a bit of discussion about a distributed single sign-on solution called OpenID which is being supported by AOL, Google, Microsoft, Verisign and Yahoo among others. This might help to solve problems like this by having a central system which requires multi-stakeholder input to iron out security weaknesses in the first place.

Big organisations often shift blame between divisions or departments because there is a lack of ownership of a problem. I have absolutely no doubt this story will not be news to many people, but I thought it was worth writing nonetheless.

The start of the problem: BT ADP Managed Accounts

One of my companies has several BT lines in different locations. BT outsource the management of small business accounts (or ours at least) to a company called ADP whose number appears on our bill and who we would get put through to deal with new lines. We’ve been talking to them a lot lately since we have been ordering a few new lines and a conversion of a BT Business Highway ISDN line into two PSTN lines in one location.

I am conscious in writing this that some of the staff there are very helpful, but in several cases we’ve been promised callbacks which have not arrived.. We’ve sent e-mails to which we’ve never received responses. Our position now is that if we can’t speak to the person we need to get hold of, we call back later since expecting a call back from them is just too unreliable.

Converting the line..

BT are withdrawing the Business Highway ISDN services early 2008 so we were contacted by ADP a few months ago about options to convert the lines into ISDN2e or PSTN lines. Since we are in the process of looking at VoIP for future voice solutions anyway and needing better redundancy on broadband, we opted for two PSTN lines, so an appointment was made for an Openreach engineer to come and convert the BT Business Highway line into two standard analogue business phone lines. I was told this process was quite simple. The first PSTN line was ordered with TotalCare (BT’s supposed enhanced service option which guarantees a 4-hour response to faults)

At this point I ought to point out that we use these lines and made it very clear to ADP that any switch-over had to be managed to minimise the downtime. During the conversion it became apparent that there were problems finding pairs that go back to the local exchange for the second line (with the Business Highway line being capable of carrying two calls down one line). This meant that the number used for faxes was completely dead. The engineer left stating that another colleague would come back later that day to finish the work.

After 3pm, I began getting worried that the problem would not be resolved so I rang our BT managed accounts (ADP) contact (one of the few who seem to have some idea of what they are talking about) and was told they were still working on it and expected it to be fixed this afternoon. We agreed that I would call back at 5pm if the lines weren’t working and of course, inevitably I called back. Following some more discussions another staff member at ADP stated near 6pm that they would be going home and that their department would be closed until Monday morning, and that as the line wasn’t working, the only possible option would be to ring faults.

The run around..

So I rang BT faults (154).. They said that since it’s an order in progress I would need to speak to BT Business Sales (152).. so I rang them.. Their system asks for the phone number and then said something along the lines of “You have one open order on the line. Your order was placed by a third party. Please contact them” before hanging up. So I call back and play with the options to get through to someone. Now this BT employee seemed a bit better and looked at the issue but advise that the system was waiting on a software update (as it had been for the past few hours) and because the engineers who deal with manual updates had gone home, we’d have to wait until the morning. I was then put through to faults on my request to register this as a fault, but faults advised me that since the line was not active, they could not raise a fault.

So.. I have no phone lines.. BT broke them.. and it’s not a fault..

So, let’s recap. BT were supposed to convert one Business Highway line into two PSTN lines because they were withdrawing the Highway service, and as a result, they’ve now left us with both lines not working. Well actually, not quite. One PSTN line has a dialtone and a telephone number attached to it which has nothing to do with us. Go figure..

The real problem with BT..

What gets to me is we pay for a business service (and Highway isn’t the cheapest option either) and then place an order with an even higher service level (TotalCare) and different departments within BT seem to pass the buck between each other. There is absolutely no ‘ownership’ of the problem. We are without a phone service[1] which we had this morning and BT do not consider this a ‘fault’.. This is utterly ridiculous. Imagine if we turned our network routers off for a day.. We wouldn’t have any customers left the following day. My general perception of BT as a company was moving forwards, but I get the strong sense of some major internal co-ordination issues where no one is interested in solving the problem. Is this the result of artificially forcing a split of BT’s Retail and Openreach businesses even?

[1] Although this does mean our fax is down and it causes us all ends of inconvenience, we don’t actually trust BT to run our main phone system (and this is precisely why!).. but that’s besides the point.

Update 16/12/07: I can report that BT did fix the first PSTN line on Saturday morning and I had a call from their sales team at around 8.55am to tell me that. The second line was sorted at 11:35am and the engineer knocked on the door. I have to say I wasn’t expecting this to be sorted until Monday so I was pleasantly surprised, not that this makes 24 hours of no service in any way acceptable because of planned work with no contingency plans in place in case they came across a problem.

Just over a year ago, we started seeing a huge deluge of anonymous posters making spam posts on the thinkbroadband forums, beyond a level which we could manually work around in a sensible way. We started looking at patterns of spam and fairly effectively prevented it using those patterns in a fairly simple detection algorithm looking as typical human versus computer behaviour. Even users on our forums spotted that spam often had the first ‘icon’ you could select to represent your post used even though it wasn’t the default one.

We tweaked the settings as the spam bots changed their style but for at least a couple of months we had quite a few get through which was annoying. When BBC News ran an article on reCAPTCHA I thought this would be ideal both to stop our spam problem and help decode old books. It provides an easy-to-use CAPTCHA solution which also has tools to help blind people get around them using audio tools.

This spam fighting tool also helps decipher old books since it shows two words, one of which it recognises. It doesn’t know what the other word says, so by solving the two words you prove that you’re human, and help digitise books by deciphering the other word.

It does present some words which are a little bit too difficult to read.. The one above isn’t too bad, but illustrates the potential problem. You can refresh it to another word pair of course.

My blog doesn’t receive that much spam but since my inbox is full enough as it is, cutting out every last one would be idea, so it’s now implemented on my blog too for comments, thanks to the plug-in for WordPress.

If you send unsolicited e-mail, you are a real spammer. It’s not just the viagra touting people who cost us money!

We all hate spam. It clogs up our mailboxes, wastes our time in sorting what is and is not a legitimate e-mail and costs us money in wasted traffic and solutions to try and curb its increasing impingement into our lives.

I tend to report spam to the service providers who allow their networks to be used to relay spam or otherwise allow their network to be used by spammers. Recently one spammer (who’se identity I’ll keep off this blog in the hope they’ve now learned their lesson) got in touch with me about a comment I made on a website about their business (after their service provider shut down their service). The e-mail read:

Dear Seb

My name is [name removed] – Sales Manager at [company removed], I have seen you recent comments posted on a website with regards our marketing, may I ask would it of been more professional to have discussed them with us 1st rather than posting in public? We are a proper business that is finding our feet and your comments do not assist the business industry, I await your comments on this matter.

Best regards

[name removed]

To say I was surprised to see an e-mail from a spammer complaining at my criticism of their marketing tactics is an under statement. I certainly didn’t expect to be expected to explain why spam was bad, but in hope I might educate someone as to the errors of their ways, I duly obliged.

Read the rest of this entry »

My old television has been making weird noises for some time and finally last weekend it broke down completely (or to be more precise was doing things which made me afraid to plug it into the mains), so I decided to buy a new TV.

I went into a Comet store and chose a suitable TV. The silver version was £50 cheaper than the black one, so I decided to browse to their website on my Nokia E90 and see if it was a mistake. Although it was the correct price, I noticed that on the website the black version was available at the same price as the store label for the silver one.

I asked one of the sales assistants if they could sell it to me at the web price, to which they said no as they don’t price match their own website. They said however I could order it on the website and pick it up in store, so I asked if that meant I could place the order on my mobile phone, and then go to the till to pick it up, to which she said “yes.. if you can do that..”

So I did.. well.. actually the Comet website’s “collect from store” option wouldn’t work on my E90 browser, so I excused myself, went to my car, took out my laptop and 3G card, went online, reserved it and went to the till showing them my laptop screen confirmation of the order. It did say it could take up to an hour to go through, but they found it in the system and promptly sold me a TV for £50 less than it was advertised at. Great rate for 10 minutes work

Some of the items on Comet have higher online discounts.. For example a large Sony 1080p HD LCD TV has a £280 discount.. I had to settle for a less expensive model

I have come into journalism in a rather unusual way in the sense that I didn’t take a journalism degree or any other formalised training specific to the industry and neither did my colleagues. When ADSLguide.org.uk started (I’m supposed to call it thinkbroadband.com but I think “AG” has a ring to it :-p), we were just a bunch of techies who wanted to provide users information about ADSL services which were in their infancy at the time. Indeed we weren’t even forward looking enough to think that using a name with “ADSL” would potentially be seen to limit us in the future

The site grew fast and we became known as ‘the’ source of ADSL related information. We suddenly had the opportunity to talk to senior people in companies who wanted a piece on our front page (or indeed some who just wanted to help us grow as they valued the independent information we provided). I think at this stage, our site was seen more as a technical aggregation/discussion site rather than a source of news so we dealt almost exclusively with the technical and product people within broadband service providers.

Over time we grew more and started being asked by other journalists to provide information for them about broadband.. I think they liked the way we aren’t there to promote any particular provider (indeed at this point we were running our site on a borrowed old server from Jezzer at the bottom of my hosting company cabinet in Telehouse only seven years ago).. With this, we started becoming much more the centre of attention, probably Andrew (MrSaffron) in particular who was the public face of our news items (and still is to a great degree). This also began the time we started spending more time on research, talking to providers, etc.

At the beginning it was an eerie feeling walking into a room and someone saying “Oh you’re the people from ADSLguide!” as if we were some celebrity which they met for the first time. This kept being repeated a few times until eventually we had met quite a few people so they began to know us. We spent quite a bit of time explaining to everyone what we did, how and why so they understood how we preferred to work.

This leads me to my point, namely how PR people deal with journalists. I was reading a series of white paper by Daryl Wilcox Publishing on how to write press releases which reminded me of the frustrations I have in dealing with PR people, leading me to believe that we are not alone.. This problem is clearly something that has been around in the traditional press for some time.

To this end, here is some advice to anyone about sending us press release:

• We only want to receive broadband-related press releases, or those that affect companies which broadband users could be affected. If your product/service is a tool broadband users might use (e.g. video streaming), then this is entirely welcome.
• All press releases should be sent by e-mail (usually to the staff member(s) you’ve dealt with before, or via the team@ address on our About page. Bear in mind that sending the press release to every e-mail address you can find on our site is likely to result in it going into the spam folder.)
• We do not open attachments unless we have a good reason to do so. All PR text should be in the body of the e-mail. By all means send us a PDF or Word file that goes with it with the nice photos and formatting, but unless we find the text appealing it won’t get opened.
• We receive lots of press releases and only write up articles on very few. This doesn’t mean we’ve not read your release, but we aren’t a news wire.
• Focus on what makes your company/client special. Have they introduced a new price point, or done something innovative? This is especially more important to the small companies because we’re not going to broadcast to everyone you’ve just introduced a £1 discount for a few months.
• We will use quotes but rarely lots of them. They are usually there to support the text but equally they should add something.

General issues to consider for anyone who writes to us at thinkbroadband (since if you’re still reading this you probably care enough to listen):

• The thinkbroadband staff are not employed full time to read press releases, announcements or to promote your company. We all have other jobs to get on with and have limited time to devote to the website. This means we don’t really want to receive a phone call from your PR people asking “have you received our press release?” ten minutes after you sent it.
• We all work in diverse locations and not in one office so we rely heavily on e-mail. This doesn’t mean we don’t exist and don’t have phones, but we find it’s the most efficient way for us to work.
• We are not an extension of your marketing department – That is to say we will give our opinion about your services, even if it’s bad. We’re not an affiliate marketing site the primary focus of which is to drive users to the highest paying service providers.
• We try to respond to courteous e-mails about concerns over comments our users have posted on the site. When we receive such requests via lawyers (the usual kind of in-house, including “corporate security”) making claims of dubious merit, they won’t incite a positive reaction. Just because we don’t have huge offices doesn’t mean we remove content because you think it shouldn’t be public.
• If you want to tell us about something brilliant or innovative, get one of your ‘techies’ to talk to us.. Marketing jargon doesn’t get far with us and you’ll just end up looking silly if you don’t know the answers to our questions.

I hope to write something more permanent for the thinkbroadband site in the coming weeks but I hope that may be of interest to anyone in the meantime.