How Not To Advertise The NBN

One of the most well known tenets of advertising is to “underpromise and overdeliver”. NBN Co appears to have taken this concept to the extreme. The latest advertisement for the NBN proudly shows a ping rate of 598 milliseconds. The future is not gamer friendly.

The ping is the reaction time of your internet connection, which is particularly important for online multiplayer gaming. The lower the number, the faster the reaction time.

Yesterday, NBN Co released a promotional video that contained the unfortunate image above. That’s a hell of a lot of lag for what is supposed to be “world class” broadband infrastructure.

To put that number into perspective, a 200+ ping is enough to put online gamers at a serious disadvantage when competing against overseas players with faster connections. The NBN just advertised a ping that’s three times slower than that.

The full video is below, with the offending shot at approximately 28 seconds. Memo to NBN marketing: if you’re going to underpromise, don’t make it this horrible.

Update: NBN Co contacted Lifehacker to point out that the ping rate in the video is from a Sky Muster end user in a remote area. “This is a standard ping time for any satellite broadband service – and delivering 25/5Mbps to remote end users is an exceptional service in global terms,” an NBN representative said.

Still, it remains an odd choice for an Australia-wide advert centered on fast broadband.

[Via Kotaku]