There's a good article in the Guardian Technology section today about the what 'unlimited' broadband means in reality. The article is interesting for the ISP industry insights that it gives, and the technical information will certainly appeal to us geeks.
The article is also relevant to another issue that IT lawyers have to deal with day-to-day. This is how the aspirational patter prevalent in talk about technology is translated into the contracts used for that technology. If 'unlimited' broadband at 8 megabits per second (for example) doesn't give the full picture of what how the broadband will work in reality, how should the contract deal with that?
The issue here from a contractual perspective is that if the service described in the contract doesn't reflect the reality of that service, an angry customer could justifiably argue that the IT supplier has breached its contractual obligations. Resolving this issue is simple: make sure that the contract accurately reflects the reality of what the service is, warts and all.
Outside the context of the contract, the marketing materials and sales talk for the service should also reflect the reality of the service as much as possible. The reason: an angry customer will go elsewhere, even if you have got the contract right. The contract being correct might mean that you keep the customer for a while longer, but as soon as they can escape from your clutches, they will do.
Putting this into the context of consumer broadband services, unless both the contracts and the marketing materials do reflect the realities of the services provided, with the 'fair-use' policies that govern usage easy to understand, customers are going to get angry and that can only mean lost business.
Comments