Quote:
Originally Posted by lucevans
To Virgin Media:
Do yourselves and your customers a favour and confirm that this rumour is, in fact, true.
If you decide to go ahead with Phorm, you will lose a significant number of customers, and, perhaps more importantly from your perspective, brand integrity.
However, you now have the opportunity to really steal a march on your (bigger) rival BT and state that you will not integrate Phorm into your network, resulting in a mass influx of disgruntled BT customers and the kind of publicity and reputation enhancement that no amount of advertising budget could achieve....
Look at it as a loss-leader: you'll lose what little revenue you might have gained from Phorm royalties (and I suspect that once systems had been developed to defeat Phorm, you'd have made sod-all from it anyway), but you stand to gain a hefty chunk of your largest rival's customer base.
YOU CAN'T LOSE!!
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Nice. I'd like to imagine they would do as you instructed but I think we will probably see some half-baked fizzle of a cop out. The corporate sneaks at VM will be trying to weigh things up, all the pros and the cons. One of the questions they will be asking themselves is how much damage will Phorm do us? How much damage will it do in the long run? How many customers will we lose vs how many will we retain and returns from churn.
VM will sit on the fence and see what BT does, and what happens to BT. They will not commit to adopt or to drop until they see the results of possible damage to BT.
I'd say more against VM if I could see something more positive come from the anti-phorm league campaign... (
http://www.antiphormleague.com) I think those guys are playing it too cool. It's almost as if you could read them as opportunists saying just enough to keep the anti-phorm people on board and looking forward to some new takeup from the churn out. I wish they would put something more professional together and start pumping a bit of money into a proper fight campaign. Sadly I think they too will just sit on the fence and say nice things with very little commitment incase it backfires on them.
Meanwhile I've been researching co-lo hosting and SSL certificates for my anti-phorm server, I was going to ask one of the anti-phorm league to give me some rackspace and bandwidth (and that would have been the ISP I moved to -- Entanet looked promising because they have a LLU so I could dump my BT line as well). The costs £50 p/m for 100 Gigabytes bandwidth for the co-lo (+£1000 hi-end BSD server) and about £20 for a chained SSL certificate from GoDaddy or £76 for 256bit SSL certificate from Thwate. I'm using Zen Internet at the moment for testing purposes but I will probably drop them because they too are playing hide and seek, wait and see.