PlusNet accuses broadband rivals of misleading customers

Marketing director Marco Potesta has claimed that the industry was “mis-selling on free” and very unprofessional to advertise services as “unlimited”.

“There’s no such thing as free and no such thing as unlimited,” Potesta told ZDNet UK on Thursday. “By definition, network is finite, the resources in the network that can be applied to customers is finite. We came clean real quick on that one, but I don’t see Tiscali coming clean on that, I don’t see other people coming clean.”

Potesta also agrees to the news of the iteration rate growing considerably at the senior staff level has shaken the PlusNet Company. One of Tiscali’s spokeswomen explained the fact that there is no misrepresentation in any of Tiscali’s products. Like many other ISPs, it has advertised quit few of its services as “unlimited” despite the introduction of a “fair usage” clause that is designed to sooth the traffic congestion at peak times but effectively serves as a cap.

“We trialed some capped products about a year ago and we found customers really didn’t understand what a cap meant,” she said. “We sell, within the ASA’s guidelines, an unlimited product – that means we don’t put a limit or a cap on our consumer products, but we do operate a fair usage policy“.

PlusNet as everyone knows is a wholesale customer of Tiscali’s in local loop unbundling (LLU). It’s a process through which an Internet service provider (ISPs) can install and configure their own equipments in BT exchanges without being a wholesale customer of BT.

However, two weeks ago, announcements of postponing the migration plan with Tiscali Wholesale’s LLU platform by PlusNet, so that it could “take stock of the situation” disturbed the market.

This all started when quite a lot of PlusNet’s customers started reporting problems in the migration. There was no alternative but to refund those who experienced such downtimes and problems. Company’s servers were down for almost 7 days which caused a loss of customer focus.

“The LLU implementation had its issues and, had we behaved as we used to behave as an organisation and had the customer at the centre of everything we did, then we firmly believe that these things wouldn’t have happened,” Potesta suggested.

“Culturally, transparency is a very difficult thing for businesses to get a hold of,” he added.