New Tricks for Old Dogs
When Bulldog’s high-speed Internet service became available in my town, I was an enthusiastic customer. Joining as a business and paying a little extra, in return got my very own Relationship Manager to smooth the way. They were very good, too, and sorted out a host of problemettes. When BBC’s Watchdog approached customers for Bulldog dirt I wrote telling them how pleased I was with the service.

Bulldog shifted ownership, staff were ‘lost’ and services gradually deteriorated. Where once a telephone number went straight to a named person one had to join the queue pressing buttons and listening to Vivaldi play through a full year, a decade even sometimes. If the phone was answered, Bulldog’s staff were as helpful as they could be, from call centres as diverse as the North of England and Mumbai. But too many billing errors and an 8Mbps line running at less than 2Mbps saw us paying BT for ADSL. Plus a complaint to my card company to recover the money Bulldog had whisked away in error and wouldn’t give back. Suddenly, the same piece of cable coming from the same exchange gave line speeds at almost maximum and seldom less than 5Mbps.

Bulldog have changed hands again but too late for Pipex, the new owners, to recover lost customers. Pipex were surprised at the drop-off when they took over from C&W and lowered the price eventually paid for Bulldog. According to thinkbroadband here, 30% of Bulldog’s clients have voted with their feet since January 2007. The latest news is that the remainder of Bulldog’s call centre staff have been told their jobs are at risk when Pipex closes Bulldog’s support lines. Hard luck for the staff and signs that the new free services from Sky and Carphone Warehouse are biting deep into the profits of the original broadband suppliers. Pipex were among the first to offer a cheap 0.5Mbps at £23.44 in 2002 at a time that others were asking up to £100 for the same.

Pay as you go turns new corner
Much has been written about the idea of road pricing, a lot of it more rabid reaction rather than reason. This includes the column inches an undemocratic ‘petition’ on Number 10’s web site gained because 2% of Britain added their names to it and national press journalists jumped on the bandwagon.

The BBC showed ‘typical’ drivers would in reality be better off in most cases, by measuring the mileage of a group of factory workers and calculating how much they would be charged if road pricing were introduced. In the program, the one driver who ought to have been paying more actually came off best even though he drove his gas-guzzling 4×4 hundreds of unnecessary motorway miles instead of using public transport. The remainder broke even or would even have paid less than Road Tax and could influence exactly how much they end up paying by avoiding busy periods and urban roads.

The government’s draft bill published on May 22 prepares the ground for local authorities to develop their own pay-as-you-drive charging in England and Wales. Pilot projects are already underway in 10 local authorities backed by £14m from the Transport Innovation Fund. Naturally, the Federation of Small Businesses and others predict doom and gloom. As a small business, I cannot agree with them, especially as working from home means I drive less than 5,000 miles a year. Any money paid for pay-as-you-drive will, in any case, be tax deductible.

But, if road pricing results in the catastrophic computer mess-ups which seem all too common place in Britain, that would see me signing every petition I could find. Bulldog couldn’t even get it right for 110,000 customers, what sort of mess will a nation of individual road pricing projects get into?