The telecom competitive landscape has produced many a lawsuit between competitors, often times citing unfair or inaccurate advertising. The latest example occurs in Las Vegas between Cox and CenturyLink. Las Vegas is a former Embarq territory, but is now CenturyLink, thanks to the CenturyTel –Embarq merger.
Cox has filed a lawsuit complaining that CenturyTel is engaged in false advertising over broadband performance with their “100% Yours” campaign. The Las Vegas Sun details Cox’s lawsuit, which basically takes issue with CenturyLink’s claim of a direct connection to the Internet for their DSL product. CenturyLink says this direct connection provides better performance than Cox’s ‘shared’ cable modem connection.
“CenturyLink customers do not receive superior speed performance compared to Cox customers during times of peak usage and the download speeds that CenturyLink customers receive can be affected by various congestion-related factors, including traffic levels on the extensive shared Internet backbone and on remote third-party networks,” the Cox lawsuit says.
These types of advertising claims are nothing new. Telephone companies have long seized on the shared nature of cable modem connections. Remember the below Pacific Bell commercials on the same subject – it was a pretty funny campaign.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5De7cjeguQk[/youtube]
I guess the more things change, the more they stay the same.
