Swedish Operators Take Important Step towards Honest Advertising
Mobile broadband often touches the borderline of legal or acceptable advertising by declaring only its theoretical maximum speeds while marketing details of broadband plans. The promised headline speeds are noticeably greater than the maximum speeds actually reached by the customers, who often end up feeling cheated.
This practice of false advertising, where the benefits of a product are magnified in order to deceive the prospective customer, is considered unethical by many. In instances where a broadband connection is promoted using its theoretical maximum speed – never reached in reality, the line between aggressive advertising and outright lying becomes blurred.
Most connections are advertised as having speeds “up to” XYZ Mbps. This deceptive tactic, which allows network providers to get away with providing far lower broadband speeds to users.
Swedish mobile broadband providers are now planning to adopt an approach that is more honest. The country’s main mobile network operators are TeliaSonera, Telenor, Tele2 and 3 – all of whom have accepted new advertising guidelines regarding download speeds of mobile broadband connections. Accordingly, customers will be informed of the practical maximum speed as against the current theoretical maximum speed.
These guidelines are to be implemented latest by 1st September 2009. Speeds for each new technology will be set and decided which will result in significant changes, as 3.6 Mbps connections will be marked down to 3 Mbps, 7.2 Mbps will become 6 Mbps, and 14.4 Mbps will be reduced to 10 Mbps.
This is a great step towards better marketing and advertising of mobile internet, which will focus on honest presentation and management of expectations as opposed to simply conveying unrealistic speeds. It is hoped that the
