Home Telecom - Invalid claims

The estate agent I'm buying a house through forwarded my details to Home Telecom.

They have made some 'interesting' claims:

Only UK provider to offer unlimited downloads usage

Broadband -We have brought a business Broadband to the residential market and are able to offer the lowest contention ratio around, at 20:1 with unlimited downloads. Our Broadband is faster and more reliable.

On the exchange I will be on they are offering this: "Our unlimited broadband is just £13.65 per month.". I'm surprised they can offer the low contention ratio at that price considering how much extra BT charge for Max Premium!

Finally their website gave me a predicted download speed of 9.7mbps which is pretty clever considering the exchange is this one: http://www.samknows.com/broadband/exchange/STMERE

They confirmed that predicted speed in a telephone call and that the service is delivered by BT.

Sales people will say all manner of things without knowing what the reality is.

The contention ratio, if an IPStream Max or WBC connection it is impossible to know what it is in the wholesale part of the network. 20:1 and 50:1 vanished years ago.

LLU networks can populate themselves to this sort of fixed level but even then a 20:1 network can perform worse than another providers 50:1

If you look at the exchange it's currently 20CN only with no LLU - which makes their predicted 9.7mbps claim 'interesting'!

I know, did look on our maps some are getting 5 or 6 Meg, and upload results point to it being only a Max exchange

ASA?

In reply to a post by jelv:

The estate agent I'm buying a house through forwarded my details to Home Telecom.

An affiliate scheme I assume .

Trading Standards!

http://www.hometelecom.co.uk/home-telecom-terms-and-...

The whole web-site appears to be junk.

I've just looked a bit more at the terms and conditions for these cowboys and found this gem:

7.11Where Home Telecom offers an unlimited Broadband service to clients it operates a fair use policy to cap the use of those who download exceptionally large amounts of data. This policy is required to allow all customers to get the most out of our service and keep speeds as high as possible across the network for all clients. The fair use cap is set at 75Gb of download capacity on a monthly basis and is sufficient to more than individually cover the usage requirements of nearly every household in the UK.

Any Fair Usage charge is clearly very exceptional but absolutely required to avoid abuse of our service. In line with our policy we reserve the right to charge clients for usage above our fair usage cap where a user exceeds this cap for 2 consecutive months � any charge (£1.25 per GB per month) will only apply to the second and any subsequent month of over usage and will only apply to usage above the cap. In all instances we will seek to contact a client to warn of any potential over use before levying a charge. For more information on our fair use policy, visit our website where you�ll find examples of download usage rates and other useful information.

Edited by jelv (Fri 15-Feb-13 23:27:50)

I've just noticed something else the fair usage is 75Gb.

I wonder if they mean 75GB or if it really is 75 Gb?