When Ofcom (or Oftel as it was known back in 2000) auctioned off the 3G spectrum for a sum that could probably buy you Belgium – Norway, at a stretch – those expensively acquired licences came with strings attached.

One of those strings was that each of the winning bidders had to cover 80% of the country – by population, not land mass – by the end of 2007. Four out of the five networks met that target, with O2 earning itself a fine for finishing the job late.

So, given that each of the five networks has at least 80% of the country covered by themselves, the figures released by Ofcom yesterday showing that only 73.1% of premises in the UK has 3G coverage from all five networks seems, at first, to be contradictory. Until you realise, of course, that those five lots of 80% coverage don’t overlap precisely, creating many “3G areas” where only one or two networks provide a signal.

Areas (or, indeed, entire countries) such as Wales, where only a fraction under half of premises are getting 3G from all five providers. Or Northern Ireland, where only 51.7% of premises have a choice of all five.

Ofcom didn’t earn its reputation as the chocolate fireguard of regulators by forcing companies to do things they don’t want to do

Consequently, the good citizens of Wales, Northern Ireland or indeed any part of the UK will most likely find that there are plenty of times when their chosen network doesn’t offer a 3G signal as they travel around the country, thus rendering their smartphones or 3G dongles effectively useless.

The networks don’t really care: they’ve already got your monthly subscription fee nestled in their coffers and the more data you download, the more it costs them. Once they’ve met their minimum 80% obligation, there’s little or no incentive for them to invest in expanding their coverage, especially in those awkward rural areas. And Ofcom didn’t earn its reputation as the chocolate fireguard of regulators by forcing companies to do things they don’t want to do. Perish the thought.

The solution

So how best to improve this patchwork quilt of UK 3G coverage? A quite brilliant answer comes from none other than a PC Pro reader, commenting on yesterday’s news story.

Step forward Mr John A Hind:

“Ofcom could make a massive improvement for everyone simply by mandating network fallback, so if a handset cannot get a signal on its home network it can transparently use any of the others with appropriate inter-network financial transfers. Also there should be something that can be done with public Wi-Fi provision to offload some of the data traffic, again with automatic fallback.”

That solution is so simple and inspired, that if Ofcom chief Ed Richards were to tragically fall under the wheels of a bus, I would camp outside Ofcom HQ until they made John A Hind the new head honcho.

It gives networks two financial incentives to improve 3G coverage: the first in the penalty payments they’d have to make to rivals for customers ‘roaming’ on their 3G network; the second being the potential money they could make by erecting a 3G mast in areas not covered by the others, and reaping those roaming fees.

There’s no technical reason why it couldn’t work, either. Take your phone abroad, and you’ll often find it will hop from one network to the next, with your home network taking care of all the billing and associated roaming fees with its foreign partner network. These systems are already in place.

In fact, the only real stumbling block is the aforementioned chocolate fireguard. “Your suggestion will be roundly ignored by Ofcom as it is far too sensible,” reader tirons1 said of Mr Hind’s masterplan.

That’s two readers who are – unfortunately, in the case of the latter – absolutely spot on.

On first inspection, Ofcom paints a rosy picture of the state of mobile broadband in Britain. O2 (somewhat surprisingly, given our past real-world tests) tops the charts with average speeds close to 3Mbits/sec, with only Orange customers looking like they should find a new network.

However, examine Ofcom’s testing methodology more closely, and it becomes clear that those chart-topping 3Mbits/sec speeds are likely to be far higher than the average customer will receive.

3G only

Ofcom tested two different types of speed test: an automated “network capability” speedtest conducted by well-known testing firm Epitiro, and a more real-world test with a panel of 1,179 consumers.

The Epitiro test was conducted using static probes from numerous sites dotted around the country (locations pictured below).

However, as Ofcom admits, those sites were cherry picked, with only those offering the best 3G/HSPA speeds across all five networks making the cut. “More than 160 of the 600 candidate sites were surveyed to determine what coverage of 3G/HSPA services were provided by each of the five MNOs [networks],” Ofcom’s report states. “Sites where good 3G/HSPA coverage was available for the majority of MNOs were prioritised for deployment of probes.”

Not surprisingly, therefore, the overall average speed recorded by the static probes – 2.1Mbits/sec – is considerably higher than the average speed recorded by the consumer panel – 1.5 Mbits/sec – which includes both 2G and 3G speeds.

Yet, for reasons I cannot fathom, Ofcom has chosen only to publish network-specific average speeds using the artificial Epitiro tests, and not the real-world consumer tests.

Download tests

Ofcom/Epitiro didn’t only cherry pick the download sites – the test they used to measure download speeds also gives a highly unrealistic measure of performance.

Before I go any further, let’s all put our cards on the table: any type of benchmark, be it the PC Pro Real World Benchmarks or Ofcom’s mobile broadband tests, all involve a degree of artificiality. Benchmarks are designed to test the relative performance of one product/company against another using pre-determined metrics – they’re not necessarily indicative of actual consumer experience.

That said, the methodology used by Ofcom/Epitiro to measure web page download time is so far removed from the real-world experience as to be almost worthless, in my opinion.

“The webpage download test involved measuring the time taken to download the HTML ‘skeleton’ of three popular UK websites,” Ofcom’s report states. “The time taken to download the associated media assets, such as images and graphics were not included.”

Consequently, Ofcom admits that “the web page download times measured may be significantly faster than the time it would take to download a full web page with all images”. You don’t say.

Ofcom claims it would take an O2 customer an average of 1.5 seconds to download a web page – I’ve never seen page-loading times as fast as that on any mobile broadband network. In fact, you’re lucky to see those kinds of speeds on ADSL.

Image compression

Ofcom claims one of the reasons it decided to omit images from its tests is because some networks compress website images, while others download full-resolution photos, potentially skewing the results. A fair point.

The two networks that compress images – O2 and T-Mobile – come first and third respectively in Ofcom’s webpage download tests.

Yet, in my experience, the networks that compress images usually offer the worst page-load times, as the process of compressing the image on their own proxy server often takes longer than downloading the full-res image. In fact, image compression is usually the first thing I switch off (if the network even lets you).

So, by failing to take into account the bulk of page content (images are obviously far more data intensive than text) and the potential impact of image compression, Ofcom’s page download times should really be taken with an enormous pinch of condiments.

Worthless tests?

Does that mean Ofcom’s entire mobile broadband tests are baseless? Absolutely not. They are highly detailed tests, with a lot of very useful information in there for people considering a mobile broadband contract.

However, if you think you’re likely to regularly get 3Mbits/sec and page download times of 1.5 seconds, I suggest you’re sorely mistaken.

For years, fixed and mobile broadband providers have used the term “unlimited” to advertise services that are anything but.

We’ve moaned about it for years, and last month even our normally docile telecoms regulator said the term “unlimited” was being abused.  “There are people offering unlimited packages that contain a fair-use policy that means what you are getting is not unlimited,” said Ofcom chief executive Ed Richards. “If you are claiming unlimited then it needs to be unlimited.”

It seems the industry wasn’t listening. New data tariffs are still being advertised as “unlimited” even when they have specific download caps.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has been conducting a review of broadband advertising, but frankly, we’re tired of waiting for this weak-kneed, self-regulating body to get its act together.

So, from now on, whenever we see a new tariff being advertised as “unlimited” when it patently isn’t, we’re going to add it to our blog of shame.

T-Mobile has the misfortune of being top of our list, simply because it’s the first network we’ve noticed to launch an offending tariff since the Ofcom chief declared war on the term “unlimited”, but we’re certain there are many more.

So we need your help. If you see a fixed or mobile operator advertising a new “unlimited” tariff that has strict limits, let us know on comments below, and we’ll name and shame them too.

THE “UNLIMITED” BLOG OF SHAME

TARIFF: T-Mobile tariff for iPad 2 (new customers)

WHAT IT SAYS: £25 per month including 1GB Anytime data, 1GB ‘Quiet Time’ data and unlimited Wi-Fi.

WHAT IT MEANS: Wi-Fi usage is subject to a 10GB per month fair usage policy.

DATE LAUNCHED: 25 March 2011.

(Update: A T-Mobile spokesperson told PC Pro: “Blocking providers from using the term ‘unlimited’ when a data cap is applied is something which Ofcom is currently considering, but hasn’t yet put in place. There are a few different options which it is still weighing up, and this is just one of them.”)

I suspect it would cause a bit of a stir. The Daily Mail would be apoplectic.  #burnrupertmurdoch would be a trending topic on Twitter in less time than it takes to strike a match.

Yet, Britain’s biggest ISPs and Ofcom are driving us towards exactly this kind of scenario on the internet. At a Westminster eForum last week, TalkTalk’s director of strategy unashamedly admitted that he could foresee a situation where Google paid his company to give YouTube priority bandwidth over the BBC iPlayer. His counterpart from BT said likewise. Both described it as a “legitimate business practice”.

So Britain’s two biggest ISPs, with more than seven million customers between them, would happily cripple a publicly-funded service for a pot of cash. And for those, like my colleagues David Fearon and Tim Danton on last week’s PC Pro podcast, who argue that this is an over-reaction, that giving one service priority over another doesn’t mean the other wouldn’t work, ask yourself this: why would content providers pay an ISP for priority bandwidth if everything worked hunky dory without it?

Why would content providers pay an ISP for priority bandwidth if everything worked hunky dory without it?

Worse still, we’re not only talking about giving one more bandwidth than the other: the prospect of ISPs actually cutting off websites because their rivals have paid for exclusivity is also being discussed at the very highest levels.

Nigel Hickson, head of EU and international ICT policy at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, said the Government was actively considering the following type of scenario:

“I sign up to the two-year contract [with an ISP] and after 18 months my daughter comes and knocks on the lounge door and says – Father, I can’t access Facebook anymore. I say – why? She says – it is quite obvious, I have gone to the site and I have found that TalkTalk, BT, Virgin, Sky, whatever don’t take Facebook anymore, Facebook wouldn’t pay them the money, but YouTube has so I have gone to YouTube. Minister, is that acceptable? That is the sort of question that we face.”

For most people, the answer to that question would be ‘absolutely not’. For telecoms regulator Ofcom, the answer is ‘bring it on’.

Laissez-faire regulator

Ofcom has recently completed a public consultation on net neutrality. The results are absolutely frightening, if Alex Blowers, the regulator’s international director, is to be believed.

When I asked him specifically if Ofcom had any objections to content owners paying ISPs for preferential traffic, he replied:

“We were very clear in our discussion document that we see the real economic merits to the idea of allowing a two-sided market to emerge, particularly for applications like IPTV where it seems to us that the consumer expectation will be a surface which is of a reasonably consistent quality that allows you to actually sit down at the beginning of a film and watch it to the end without constant problems of jitter or the picture hanging or whatever.

So from our point of view we were pretty clear on that point, and nobody has yet knocked us off that view that a two-sided market could be economically beneficial. The issue is, as always, the devil is in the detail.”

To be fair to Blowers, he did say that both the EU and Ofcom would demand transparency from the ISPs, and that the EU would almost certainly object to the outright blocking of legal services. But just because a particular website or service isn’t blocked, it doesn’t mean it can’t suffer irreparable damage.

The Skype problem

Net neutrality has already been smashed by most of Britain’s biggest ISPs. All of the big six British ISPs routinely discriminate between different types of internet traffic: putting the brakes on peer-to-peer traffic during peak hours, for example. They claim this is necessary to deliver a smooth and consistent service to all of their customers, although it’s worth noting that the seven-time winner of PC Pro’s broadband ISP award, Zen Internet, doesn’t deploy traffic management (and is routinely praised for the speed of its connections), nor do some of the big ISPs in the US.

Slowing peer-to-peer traffic to a crawl doesn’t only harm the bandwidth hogs who are trying to download ten different HD movies from Pirate Bay, it harms legitimate services too

This blanket discrimination against certain protocols can be enormously damaging. Slowing peer-to-peer traffic to a crawl doesn’t only harm the bandwidth hogs who are trying to download ten different HD movies from Pirate Bay, it harms legitimate services too.

As Skype’s director of government and regulatory affairs, Jean-Jacques Sahel, pointed out:

“Peer-to-peer applications are very wide ranging, they go from the lovely peer-to-peer file-sharing applications that were referred to in the Digital Economy Act, all the way to things like the BBC iPlayer [which used to be P2P] or indeed Skype, which is both a VoIP and a peer-to-peer application. So what does that mean? If I manage my traffic from a technical perspective, knowing that Skype actually doesn’t eat up much bandwidth at all, why should that be de‐prioritised because it’s peer-to-peer as opposed to any other applications.”

Sahel pointed to the mobile market as a prime example of the harmful effects of such blocking. Skype is routinely blocked – both by protocol and specifically – by British mobile networks, who are worried that the VoIP service would harm their voice revenues. Campaigners such as The Open Rights Group’s chief executive Jim Killock are worried that fixed-line broadband is heading down the same path:

“You look at the levels of restriction on devices in the mobile sector compared to what we are able to do on our computers at home and it’s an entirely different world. This is why I say look at the mobile market, think if that is how you want your internet and your devices to work in the future because that is sort of where these things are leading.”

Britain’s sleepwalking into a net neutrality nightmare, and the powers that be think it’s a good thing.

Ofcom chief executive Ed Richards would certainly never use the L word when referring to ISPs. He’s far too cautious for that. Yet, even he admitted for the first time yesterday that ISPs have been selling consumers broadband speeds that they couldn’t possibly achieve.

“Speeds should only be advertised if they’re achievable by some customers,” Richards proclaimed, referring to the invidious practice of selling broadband based on theoretical maximums rather than actual throughput. “Clearly ‘up to’ claims are not as clear as they should be.”

The 115-page report on UK broadband speeds makes it perfectly clear that the ISPs have been over-egging their speeds. “In practice, advertised headline ‘up to’ speeds are rarely delivered,” Ofcom states. “Our present research found that the overall average download speed delivered to UK residential consumers was 5.2Mbits/sec, only 45% of the average headline speed of ‘up to’ 11.5Mbits/sec”.

In some cases, it’s not the case that headline speeds are “rarely delivered” – they’re simply impossible to achieve. On “up to 8Mbits/sec” BT connections (either direct from the company itself or via an ISP that rents lines off BT), for example, the maximum possible throughput is 7.2Mbits/sec.

“If a line synchronises at 8,128Kbits/sec (~8Mbits/sec), systems such as the BT Broadband Remote Access Server (BRAS) system limit user traffic to 7.15Mbits/sec,” Ofcom’s report states, confirming what anyone who’s ever looked at their modem synch-speed will have known for years.

Likewise, “up to 24Mbits/sec” ADSL2+ lines will never provide actual throughput greater than 21Mbits/sec (as PlusNet explains here), which is why some of the more honest ISPs sell ADSL2+ as “up to 20Mbits/sec”.

So if Ofcom won’t use the L word, and my lawyers won’t let me use it either, what word should we use to describe such sharp practice?

In a nutshell, anyone who provides an open Wi-Fi connection – be that a company with a free hotspot in their reception or a home user who decides to leave their router unprotected – will be held responsible if someone downloads copyrighted material on their connection. (Unless, bizarrely, they are a coffee shop or other business that offers Wi-Fi access in conjunction with other goods or services, in which cased they’re treated as an ISP).

In its draft proposals, Ofcom issued the following guidance:

“Those who wish to continue to enable others to access their service will need to consider whether [to] take steps to protect their networks against use for infringement, to avoid the consequences that may follow.”

When I asked Ofcom’s press office what steps someone could take to safeguard their network, other than password-protection – which by definition means the end of open Wi-Fi – the regulator unhelpfully suggested that users should talk to their ISPs.

At a Westminster e-Forum on file-sharing yesterday, BT’s director of group industry policy, Simon Milner, summed up the ridiculousness of this position. “How on earth do you try to prove that you didn’t infringe copyright [on your Wi-Fi connection] and didn’t take reasonable steps [to protect the connection]?” he asked.

Joining BT on the panel was Ofcom’s director of policy development, Campbell Cowie. So I once again took the opportunity to ask him how people can run open Wi-Fi connections and not be held responsible for passers-by downloading copyrighted music on them. His reply: “Your ISP is best placed to advise”.

This simply won’t do. It’s pure cowardice on the part of the regulator to issue proposals stating that those operating Wi-Fi hotspots will be held responsible for the actions of others, and then not tell hotspot owners how they can protect themselves.

As Lord Lucas, who was chairing the debate, said after hearing Ofcom’s reply to my question: “I do think Ofcom is ducking its responsibility.”

“These are critical bits of proof that people ought to have available to them,” Lucas added. “We have to provide consumers with a good and robust defence.”

We need answers, Ofcom. And we need them fast.

Today, Ofcom’s own research has conclusively proved that ISPs are simply ignoring the regulations laid out in Ofcom’s Voluntary Code of Practice on Broadband Speeds. Fewer than half of the ISPs called in a mystery shopping exercise volunteered information about the actual speed a customer could expect on their broadband line – a key requirement of the code.

Has Richards reacted with unbridled fury to the revelation that ISPs are plainly flouting the rules? Is he going to make good on his 2008 promise of mandatory regulation if the ISPs failed to abide by the voluntary code? Is he even willing to name and shame the ISPs that aren’t playing by the rulebook? No, no and no.

Instead, our fearless regulator is going to make minor tweaks to the code and once again “consider whether it is necessary to introduce formal regulations”. How much more evidence does he need? It’s been 15 months since the code “came into force”, more than enough time for ISPs to get their house in order, and they’ve patently failed. Now’s the time for action, not “consideration”.

Indeed, you even begin to wonder who Richards and Ofcom are working for: us or the ISPs. Ofcom’s press release on its mystery shopping exercise put the maximum positive spin on its mystery shopper research. “The research found that the majority (85%) of telephone mystery shoppers were provided with an estimate of the maximum speed available on their broadband line before signing up with a provider,” the release reports. “However, almost half (42%) of these shoppers had to prompt providers for their speed late in the sales process.”

Or in other words, more than half of broadband providers failed to inform customers what they were buying. Indeed, almost three quarters of the ISPs failed to tell the shoppers that their actual speed was likely to dip below the headline speed. At best it’s negligence; at worst it’s evidence of industry-wide miss-selling.

Richards claim the research shows “consumers are now receiving more accurate information at the point of sale about their broadband service”. To my eyes, the research shows that broadband providers have as much respect for the code as a dog does for a lamppost.

If Richards can’t bring himself to take tougher action against broadband providers who blatantly mislead their customers, it’s time his Government paymasters took tougher action with him. Do your job, Mr Richards, or make way for someone that will.

The problem is it’s not true. At least not true in the sense of what you and I would call “broadband” in 2010 – a connection fast and reliable enough to play even standard definition shows from the BBC iPlayer, for instance, or swiftly download a self-assessment tax form.

BT and Ofcom use the same definition for “broadband” today as they did a decade ago, when we were gawping in awe at 512Kbits/sec lines – “always-on services, offering data rates of 128Kbits/sec and above”.

The internet’s changed; BT and Ofcom seemingly haven’t noticed. As Amy Pelnderleith, a councillor from South Derbyshire, where a quarter of the residents of one village claim their actual connection speed is below 512Kbits/sec, told us yesterday: “We’re getting small businesses not able to survive because they can’t get reliable broadband. It’s so poor, especially at peak times, that it drops out completely.”

Yet, when we asked BT to comment on the South Derbyshire situation it responded with: “Almost all of BT’s exchanges across the UK support broadband speeds of up to 8Mbits/sec, ensuring that rural areas in the UK enjoy a high level of broadband availability.”

They just don’t get it, do they? Nobody gives a hoot what speed the exchange is capable of – they care what speed they’re getting on their PC. And that’s plainly not good enough for millions of people across the country.

If Britain’s ever to get the broadband network it needs, three things need to happen:

1. Broadband = 2Mbits/sec and above

Ofcom’s official definition of “broadband” must be raised to 2Mbits/sec and above. The Government’s set the target of universal of 2Mbits/sec connections by 2012; the regulator needs to drop its decade-old definition and raise its sights too. As long as BT’s allowed to get away with claiming 99% of the country can get broadband, nothing will be done to rectify the appalling speeds experienced in large parts of the country.

2. 2Mbits/sec must mean 2Mbits/sec

The Government’s set this vague target of nationwide 2Mbits/sec connections, but no-one’s prepared to define exactly what that means. Does it mean “up to 2Mbit/sec”, which is actually meaningless? Does it mean 2Mbits/sec at the exchange? (BT will claim it’s already done this, as we’ve seen above.) Or does it mean consumers genuinely seeing 2Mbits/sec throughput in their homes? Ask the Government and you’ll get a different answer every time.

The Digital Economy Bill is passing through Parliament now. The peers and MPs must ensure it’s clearly stipulated that the speed guarantee means an actual 2Mbits/sec data throughput in people’s homes and businesses. Anything less isn’t worth the paper the bill’s written on.

3. Price caps for lines slower than 2Mbits/sec

Why should people suffering from appalling speeds pay the same as someone in a city centre with a 20Mbits/sec connection? Ofcom must prevent BT and other ISPs charging customers any more than £5 per month for connections with an actual throughput slower than 2Mbits/sec. Who wants to bet that BT will suddenly find it can afford to sort out sluggish “broadband” connections if its bottom line is under threat?

Instead of courage, creativity and innovation, the mood coming from Britain’s broadband leaders was complacency, resignation and a weary confession that we’re “still going round the same issues time and time again”.

The half of the country that’s connected to fibre provided by Virgin Media, BT or any number of local projects can almost certainly look forward to download speeds of 40Mbits/sec plus in the next few years. But what about the other half – the half living outside of the big cities that are already struggling on sub-standard connections?

Perhaps impetus for a nationwide next-gen network would be greater if the industry was willing to admit that our current infrastructure just isn’t good enough. But the complacency of BT’s director of public affairs, Tim O’Sullivan, was staggering to behold. Confronted with statistics that show Britain’s current position in the international broadband league is “more Championship than Premiership”, and a second report from Cisco that claims Britain’s crumbling broadband network could threaten our future competitiveness, O’Sullivan responded with platitudes bordering on arrogance. More than 99% of the country already has access to broadband, he retorted, 40% of which have access to “up to” 20Mbits/sec connections on BT’s network. “People should take stock and have a dose of reality in these debates,” he snapped.

If he wants a dose of reality he should talk to the Country Land and Business Association (CLA) and its tens of thousands of members who can’t get a broadband connection worthy of the name. He should talk to the small business owners who are forced to relocate because they can’t get a stable ADSL connection. He should talk to the people who are seriously considering moving to mobile broadband – and its average connection speed of 0.87Mbits/sec – because it’s still faster than their landline.

Ofcom’s lapdogs

Yet is it any surprise that BT rests on its laurels, when even our supposed consumer champions are so desperately meek? “2Mbits/sec is good enough for today, but it’s absolutely not enough for tomorrow,” Anna Bradley, chair of the Ofcom-sponsored Communications Consumer Panel told the audience. Sorry Anna, but 2Mbits/sec isn’t good enough. It isn’t good enough to watch the HD streams from BBC iPlayer – a service the vast majority are already paying for through the licence fee. It isn’t good enough for many people to work from home, because of the deplorable upload speeds. It isn’t good enough in modern multi-PC households, with two, three or more devices trying to connect to the internet simultaneously.  No wonder that a spokesman for Lord Corbett referred to the Communications Consumer Panel as the “Industry Backside Protection Unit”.

Hope for the future?

So what hope is there for nationwide superfast broadband? BT says there’s no business case to lay fibre in any more than 40% of the country; some others estimate that 60% may get fibre by market forces alone. But even the most optimistic predictions don’t go above that figure.

Mobile won’t step into the breach. “There isn’t spare capacity in mobile networks to augment fixed-line networks,” said Forrester analyst Ian Fogg. “Mobile next-generation access is about the twenty-four seven lifestyle – it won’t be an alternative to fibre or Virgin Media’s network.”

Which leaves half the country pinning its hopes on Government intervention – although few think Lord Carter’s broadband tax will raise anywhere near enough to fibre the nation, and the Tories have pledged to scrap it if they get into power next year anyway.

In fact, the best hope of widespread fibre might come from innovative start-up projects, such as Fibrecity’s cost-cutting solution of running fibre though the sewer network. The company’s Adrian Cook said Fibrecity would shortly announce another ten cities that would benefit from the technology, and laughed off suggestions that fibre deployment need cost anything close to the figures suggested by the likes of BT and the BSG. “[We can install fibre for] significantly less than £400 per home,” he said. “If I were anywhere near that, my chief financial officer would have something to say about it.”

Perhaps someone can put a word in, and get this man a job at BT.

Take the Information Commissioner, for example. Christopher Graham may have started talking tough about cracking down on data leaks when he waltzed into his six-figure salary job this summer, but his feeble actions speak far louder than his fighting talk.

It was the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) who revealed that staff at a UK mobile network had illegally sold thousands of customer account details to brokers. That data was used to cold-call customers nearing the end of their contracts, in a bid to convince them to move to a rival network.

Mr Graham used this revelation to repeat his calls for “deterrent custodial sentences” to “stop the trade in unlawful personal information”. What he wasn’t prepared to do, however, was name the network involved – the very company who had a legal duty to protect its customers’ data. “We are preparing a prosecution case, and it would obviously prejudice a prosecution,” said a spokesperson, when asked why the ICO had taken a sudden vow of silence.

Of course, it took us no longer than two or three hours to work out who the guilty party was. Britain only has five major mobile networks – once we’d got the blanket denials from the other four, T-Mobile had little choice but to release a confession, issuing a mightily ironic riposte to the Information Commissioner for breaching its confidentiality in the process.

No-one’s disputing the fact that the real villains here were the members of staff who stole the data and sold it to the brokers – indeed, in some respects, T-Mobile was as much a victim as the people who had their details pilfered. But something was inherently wrong with an IT system that allowed employees to steal thousands of customer records and seemingly go undetected for months.  And there’s something even more wrong with an Information Commissioner that pledges to “promote openness by public bodies” and then tries to hide the identity of companies who fail to protect their customers’ data.  Not to mention the fact he’s now given T-Mobile’s lawyers a cast iron defence should any prosecution actually materialise (“The case has been prejudiced, m’lud”).

Abject ad watchdog

The Information Commissioner isn’t the only watchdog you can barely hear bark, let alone see it bite. Take the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA). I’ve lamented its abysmal failure to clamp down on the worst excesses of broadband providers in the past – ads for “unlimited broadband” that have strictly defined limits, for instance.

Yet, its ineffectiveness reached new lows in a recent adjudication against Vodafone. The ASA upheld a complaint made against adverts claiming the network had “abolished” its roaming charges, when in fact Vodafone had merely postponed the charges for a few months. (Vodafone, incidentally, made a valiant attempt to redefine the word “abolished” in its defence to the ASA, the comical details of which you can read here.)

Being a summer campaign, Vodafone stopped running the adverts at the end of August. The ASA issued its adjudication on 28 October. The sanction? “The ads must not appear again in their current form.” Bravo.

The ASA has a staff budget of more than £5 million, according to its most recent annual report. Yet it takes an average of 66 days to resolve complaints that require investigation. Even if an industry-funded body is never going to dish out fines to the companies that pay its way, is it really too much to ask for it to deal with complaints more promptly?

Ofcom go-slow

Then again, when it comes to quick responses, we should all bow to the undisputed procrastination masters, Ofcom. Back in 2007, Ofcom told mobile phone networks they would have to transfer customers’ numbers from one network to another within two hours by September this year.  However, Ofcom’s plans were waylaid when the Competition Appeals Tribunal (CAT) ruled that it had had got its sums wrong over the cost of implementing such measures. Ofcom said it would cost £5m, Vodafone successfully argued it would cost closer to £37m, so it was only out by a factor of seven or eight.

Now Ofcom has had to start the whole tedious process from scratch, and says it “aims to have any new porting process arrangements in place during 2011”. (“These things take time,” an Ofcom spokesperson told me.)  Oh, and instead of two hours, it’s now considering watering down the transfer time to one working day.

With watchdogs like these, who needs enemies?