Bresnan Communication's Advertising

Bresnan Communications, a cable TV, broadband internet and VOIP firm based in New York began selling their services after they bought out the local cable companies in many parts of Wyoming and the region. The company has an A rating on the BBB's website (http://www.bbbsw.org/BBBWeb/Forms/Business/CompanyReportPage_Expository.aspx?CompanyID=10100135) and there are very few complaints against the company. Honestly, that is really surprising to me. I've had their service for about 4 years now and the broadband internet was originally worthless. I constantly experienced slow speeds and intermittent connections. We later found out after several house calls and 3 modem replacements that the coax cable going into the house needed to be replaced. The several agents that came in the past either blamed the problems on my wireless router or maintenance being done by Bresnan themselves. Those problems aside, I am supposed to be getting 8.0 mbps. In reality I average around 6. Bresnan's service has stepped up over the years buy their recent television advertising is very false and unrealistic.

Take a look at the “DSL” video at the bottom of the page.

http://www.bresnan.com/dontsettle/

Bresnan compares their cable broadband service to Qwest's DSL broadband service. Qwest is the local telephone provider in a large part of the Western US and is the main competition to Bresnan here in Wyoming.

First of all, “The phone company wants you to think that DSL is as fast as Bresnan High Speed Internet....”

Never have I heard an advertisement from Qwest or any other phone company saying that their speed is faster than Bresnan. I could be wrong but I highly doubt it. This isn't even the good part of this document.

Second are the ridiculous download times the quote for each activity. They Claim:

There are several problems with these statistics. One, we do not know the file size of each of these activities being used to compare. Two, we don't have a clear explanation of “sharing” a photo , downloading a “video game” or even a movie. The songs in my iTunes library range anywhere from under 1 Mb to 22 Mb depending on bit rate, format and length. Now onto pictures; a photo from a cell phone can range in the hundreds of kilobytes while a RAW image from a 12mp professional digital camera can be 20 or 30mb. How are we “sharing” this photo? Via email, IM, message board? What exactly is a video game? Are we talking about the latest and greatest video game distributed via digital download or are we talking about a fancy 3D solitaire? Video games are distributed on both CD and DVD allowing each media to be anywhere from 700mb to 4.7gb. Some video games are on multiple discs or on dual layer DVDs. The possible file size can be nearly anything from a few megabytes to several gigabytes. And what exactly is a movie according to Bresnan's specifications? Are we talking about a DVD ISO image on a P2P site or an iPod formatted movie on iTunes? We have no idea what any of these activities are or the file sizes. So let's so a little approximating on our own. Bresnan offers 8mb/s download rates and in their other advertisements they claim Qwest only provides 1.5mbps. Okay, good enough, now lets give an approximate file size and some specifications for each of the activities in their advertisement.

“Download a song” will consist of a 4 mb song, this seems to be an average and fair size; many songs in iTunes are around this size.

“Share a picture” will be a 1392x928 size photo that weighs in at 3.7mb (try one of these http://www.letsgodigital.org/en/16692/sony-alpha-a700-test-photos/)

“Download a video game” will be a download of The Orange Box. The download size is about 6.82 gb on a P2P site (won't credit this one due to obvious legal reasons, Google it yourself)

“Download a movie” will be the 1.02 Gb download of “Jumper” from the iTunes movie store.

Using some easy math and the knowledge that a megabyte is different from a megabit, we come up with these results.

Some of these values are actually pretty close. Take into account that the download speed stays a constant 1.5 mbps or 8.0 mbps for the entire download period. The hosting servers also has a decent connection. Does that mean Bresnan is actually telling the truth? Absolutely not. “Over 1 minute” is not a valid response. If Bresnan “knows” the exact download speed of these activities on their 8.0 mbps service then how hard is it to figure it out on a 1.5mbps service? A solid 8.0 mbps isn't even possible with their service as of right now. Bresnan seems to think that they live in perfect world without latency and slow servers and web traffic. DSL actually gets slower the further away you are from the phone companies service POP. Bresnan offers digital HD cable and VOIP, the bandwidth from these services could slow down their 8.0mbps internet service. Not to mention outages, old equipment and maintenance and server issues. There are so many factors that make their advertised speeds inconsistent with what users really experience (http://www.broadbandinfo.com/news/isp-speedometers.html) Overall, Bresnan's claims are ridiculous and false to some extent. The company fails to explain the details of how they arrived to the conclusion of their comparison against DSL.