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Home » Opinion » Rants » Southern Electric - Broadband from your socket

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Southern Electric - Broadband from your socket

A friend asked me today what she should do about getting broadband as her area has no cable and they are over six miles from the nearest telephone exchange. Satellite was the obvious answer but for a normal residential solution it's prohibitively expensive. Then I remembered my father telling me about 25 years ago that it is possible to send data packets down electricity cables so I wondered if any of the electricity companies had jumped onto the Broadband wagon yet.

A quick Google helped me find the exciting news that Southern Electric now has a Broadband proposition using your electricity supply at a market standard rate with the added advantage that the up-line speed is the same as the down-line speed, unlike my cable broadband at home.

I wondered if there was a limit on the amount of data you can transfer each month (I have still not found the information on that) and if it was available in my part of London. I searched the FAQ’s and did not find the info I needed and then I noticed the 'Get your paws on it' (they use a cheetah as the main page image) and went through to their Register your interest page.

Here the first thing that is mentioned is that they need to be able to identify if your area has the broadband service available yet.
The second is that they take your privacy very seriously and there is a check box to enable you to opt out of any information deluge.

Remember those two bits.

I then filled in the form, no fields are marked as required, but did not put my Town in as I was putting my postcode in and all they would need is a house number to pinpoint me. I pressed submit and got a warning screen telling me that I had either used illegal characters (what does that mean to me? I might go to prison for using backslash?) or had not filled in a required field. I tutted and pressed the link to take me back.
I filled in the missing Town field and press submit.

A few minutes later I received a reply e-mail from Southern Electric.

Thank you for your recent enquiry on broadband from Southern Electric. We currently have broadband from Southern Electric available in some areas of Winchester.

If you are based in:

Winchester -
Your details have been passed to our design team who will review the substation connecting your home or business to our electricity network. As soon as this review is complete, we will let you know by email if your home or business can be connected to our broadband service.

Any other area -
We have updated our records to register your interest and will contact you when we can provide you with further information. Please click on this link: http://www.southern-electric.co.uk/broadband/ to visit our website for the latest information on broadband from Southern Electric. We are constantly developing this site to provide you with as much information as possible.

Title: Mr
First name: Simon
Mid. initial:
Surname: Cox
House name/number: XX
Street: XXXXX
Town/city: Croydon
Region/county:
Post Code: XXXXXX
Telephone (Day): XXXXXX
Telephone (Eve):
E-mail: XXXXXX
Service Option: Silver
Where did the customer hear about us: Website
If the place heard about us not listed, specify:

Privacy : No objections
Received at: 14/07/2004 10:20:50

FormName : BroadbandregistrationofinterestSE

Winchester? One place? Why did they need my details to work that out? I could have worked that out if they had mentioned on the web page that they are only in Winchester at the moment.

Privacy : No objections? What the f!@K? I bloody well do object!

Then I realised that when I had pressed the link to go back to the form, Southern Electric had made a decision for me that I either had mistakenly decided that I did not want junk communications from them or that by not filling in a field that was not marked as required that I was too thick to care if the junk mail box was now unchecked. I went back and checked this and sure enough when you go back it takes off the check but not the rest of your onfo.

All my other information was retained but not this piece. Why?

This appears to be either a very sneaky way to get new leads for thier business or an awfull design failure. Southern Electric sell many other products, not that if you go through to their products page is there actually any immediate information on them, I suspect you need to register you interest for everything. Which makes me think that their whole web presence is a honey trap to hard sell products or they have no idea what usability is.

I rather hope that I do not find that they have taken my interest in their Broadband service to mean that they can switch my gas and electric over to their supply – a practice that the UK watchdogs have been up in arms about for a couple of years now.

Broadband vie your Electric supply is possible in Winchester but with a company that I am beggining to suspect is sales rather than service driven.

Let me know if you have had any experiences like this.

Miffed of Croydon.

Posted by Simon at July 14, 2004 5:08 AM

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Comments

1 July 18, 2005 11:22 AM colin grayson

what happened about southern electric's broadband?

2 July 18, 2005 11:04 PM Simon Cox

Well the service is now called Blink but as far as I can make out they still won't tell you where they operate until you register an interest - still just in Winchester then...