Friday, August 01, 2008

Most annoying advert

I'm sure that many people will disagree with me about what my current most annoying advert on TV is. We all get annoyed for many reasons after all, but you see, as a customer of Virgin Media (BT wanted to charge me £180 to install a line so I told them to sod off), it is their adverts that with Samuel L Jackson that get me raging.

According to their adverts they use fibre-optic to deliver you your Internet connection. This is, a half-truth though, and the ASA even reported on it. It's a tad misleading you see because Virgin do not use fibre to deliver thaqt super-fast snazzy porn to your screen.

No, it might very well be fibre (although not necessarily) to the green box at the end of your street. But the final loop is good old-fashioned coax, the exact thing that the adverts say is rubbish and all the other ISPs use. It's a bit like when BT released their "digital phone" handsets. The handsets might have been digital, but your phone was still analogue.

So yes, Virgin Media adverts, annoying because they mislead people into thinking they have fibre into their homes when they patently do not, and frankly, never will for some time yet, because it costs too much to light all the dark fibre that is out there.

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Welcome back!

Always keep immodium handy for such events


JH

Guido Fawkes said...

Isn't it glass to the box outside?

dizzy said...

Yes, it's fibre to the green box as I said. The last part is coax and is subject to the usual attentuation problems of coax.

Guido Fawkes said...

Over 3-4 metres?

Anonymous said...

Dizzy,

true... but most ISPs use BT's copper to get to your home and that is twisted pair not co-ax and hence offers worse performance for high frequency signals...

Yours nerderly,

BillyBoy

dizzy said...

No Guido, it;s not 3-4 metres. Its anything up to a half a kilometre in copper sheild coax. The point is that it's not fibre.

Anonymous said...

Of course the other problem with fibre is that you are sharing the fibre connection unlike copper connection with ADSL. Just make sure your neighbour is not a hacker.

CityUnslicker said...

you are way wrong. Have you seen the oasis adds with cactus kid - brownian in its shiteness

Anonymous said...

I'm sorry..the most annoying advert is "knock off nigel". 6 million people download shite off the internet, so we're all nigels.

Its a poor attempt at social engineering, so whoever came up with that, go and shoot yourself before nigel does!

Mook