Factually Garbage

Oct 23 2008

The BBC News posted an article this morning describing British broadband usage limits imposed by ISPs. I was shocked to read that Virgin Media has a 2.7Gb (sic) limit per week because I was sure they had an unlimited downloads offering, subject to an acceptable usage policy.

We use the BBC iPlayer and Channe 4 on Demand services at home and I felt a little concerned that somehow I had overlooked this limit and that we would be in line for a hefty charge for additional bandwidth use.

The Virgin Media Acceptable Use Policy says nothing about an exact limit so I emailed the BBC to ask them to explain where the figure came from. They didn’t respond, but they updated the infobox in the article between 11:19 and 15:23.

Below you can see on the left, the original infobox, and on the right, the updated infobox.

Orginal infobox on broadband limits Updated infoxbox on broadband limits

There is no acknowledgement from the BBC in the article that the infobx has been updated and now might be more accurate. It looks like they made some factual errors with Sky and Plusnet too.

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  • About

    Desmond is a Ph.D candidate in the School of Informatics at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests are computational linguistics, natural language processing, and cognitive modelling.

    He previously completed an MSc by Research at the Department of Computing Science at the University of Glasgow and a BSc at the University of Edinburgh.

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