BT’s latest attempt to drum up publicity for its ‘Race to Infinity’ broadband campaign has hit another snag. The ISP team at Choose.net take a look at why its ‘online petition’ strategy may have backfired…
In late 2010, we wrote here that BT Infinity’s ‘Race to Infinity’ PR stunt was taking a big risk.
Exposing demand for superfast broadband to scrutiny was likely to show that a high proportion of households were actually fairly ambivalent about fibre, if not openly skeptical about BT’s ability to provide it.
At the time of writing, some areas with the slowest broadband also had the fewest votes. By the end of voting, although six exchange areas had hit BT’s 100% of households voting target only a few more had more than 60% support.
As one of the comments on our previous article pointed out, rural areas have reason to be cynical when it comes to broadband upgrades – BT also overpromised then under delivered when ADSL exchanges were unbundled.
Aside from those issues, however, ‘Race to Infinity’ was broadly successful: BT showed that they were committed to bringing fibre broadband to rural areas eventually and to allowing communities to jump the queue where the need, or more accurately demand, was greatest.
As the winning villages begin to receive their new services, however, the risk of the campaign backfiring strikes again.
This week the Oxford Mail reported that the village of West Hagbourne wouldn’t be receiving fibre services despite the fact that all of its hundred-odd households had voted to update the Blewbury exchange which serves the village.
BT have explained to all winners that “when an exchange is enabled, there will be some premises not able to receive fibre” and that seems fair, technical issues may prevent 100% coverage. But that’s only part of the story.
Those in West Hagbourne were promised FTTC broadband earlier on in the upgrade process and then denied it. BT have even suggested that the villagers pay, or find the funding, for installation of the street cabinet they were originally promised for free.
For advertisers, the lesson here is one of communication: if BT want engagement they have to be willing to show that they can deliver to those who are engaged.
This is a guest post by consumer broadband site Choose, which covers BT’s fibre broadband network rollout and has reviewed the BT Infinity service.
