What's the point of Virgin Media's latest broadband speed claim?

Virgin Media has claimed it can now deliver 8 Gbps broadband, but you have to ask whether there is any point aside from satisfying executive’s egos as the ‘faster than you’ mentality undermines the industry.

To be clear, Virgin Media is not the only telco that destabilises customer confidence and makes claims which are often twisted and contorted by their spin doctors, resulting in the miseducation trends of recent years, but they are the ones doing it today.

In Cambridgeshire, one of the UK’s technology hubs, Virgin Media is trialling what it describes as the ‘UK’s fastest home broadband’ service, with speeds exceeding 8 Gbps. This might sound fantastic and serves as an excellent means to distract onlookers from shortcomings elsewhere in the Virgin Media business, but why?

Why do customers need an 8 Gbps broadband connection? What services and applications could possibly be satisfied by such lightening speeds? In the future there might well be demand for such services, but right now there are arguably other things Virgin Media should be concentrating on.

This is the current issue with the telco industry on the whole, and why the telcos will struggle over the next couple of years; the obsession with ‘bigger, meaner, faster’ is unhealthy and is limiting the ambitions of the telcos themselves.

All of this comes back to the relationship with the customer. Every telco is obsessed with being the fastest around, as it is commonly believed this is what the customer wants, and therefore all messaging is geared around this ambition. Advertisements are flooded with imagery and claims which are unrealistic and more often than not, un-needed.

Instead of focusing on a single test which claims PR plaudits for hitting 8 Gbps in a very specific area of the UK, why not concentrate on delivering a more satisfactory service across the board? You correspondent used to be a Virgin Media customer and can assure you promised speeds were never met. The telco industry’s obsession with wowing the world with headline figures is compounding the misery of mistrust.

If Virgin Media wants to succeed in the broadband world and be more than a quirky challenger with a famous brand ambassador, it should aim to create a wonderful experience for all customers, not chase shallow headlines. This is of course a wonderful example of what is possible in the world of tomorrow, but customers are getting screwed today.

Customers don’t care what the maximum speed of a service is, as long as it is more than what is required for a good experience. If a household requires 50 Mbps to make everything work, does it really matter whether the top speed is 55 Mbps or 5 Gbps. All this obsession does is lure the majority of customers into a false promise of performance and create problems for the future.

Looking at the bigger picture, the telcos with a mobile offering are going to have to move away from this obsession with speed before too long. As it stands, customers who have a stable 4G connection can pretty much do anything they want. There are very few (if any) consumer applications which exceed the capabilities of 4G. And if there are, we suspect there are other factors involved.

This leads us onto one of the biggest questions telcos will face at Mobile World Congress in a couple of weeks’ time; how will they sell 5G to the consumer?

There are of course plenty of reasons to be excited by 5G, but as a consumer why would I be bothered? The applications which will require 100 Mbps or more are not widely available on smartphones, while few connect laptops to the internet outside of wifi. We strongly suspect telcos will market 5G on the grounds of ‘faster is better’, but most will look at the premium and likely decide they have fast enough.

Virgin Media’s 8 Gbps broadband trial is perfectly representative of the industry we work in today. While there is always a need for progress, there are more cogs spinning in the machine than just the speed one.

The unhealthy obsession with ‘bigger, meaner, faster’ is falsely reinforcing the belief that telcos are going a good job, both across the mobile and broadband segments. At some point, someone is going to have to sit down and realise there is more to the world of telecommunications than speed.