Cheap attempt to increase competition in Belgian telecom
Apparently price settings for telecom (broadband/mobile/land line) plans in Belgium are significantly higher than its neighbouring countries and our Belgian government has decided to do something about it.
I try to avoid posts about Belgian/Dutch subjects but this one is too big of a disgrace:
To increase competition between operators, our government has launched a site to compare different telecom offers (Dutch). I can only assume someone naively decided this is the cheapest way to get prices to drop without extra legislation and while one can doubt its effectiveness in case of (forbidden) price setting agreements between operators, it must have cost (or still costs) huge amounts of time to get up-to-date data in their application.
If you now doubt this is something a government should occupy itself with, you’re not alone.
But it gets even worse. As you may have guessed looking at the site, the underlying code is terrible. This is even more sad because, while very basic and a bit outdated, there are guidelines for creating sites from the government (Dutch).
With less work and more talented people, they could have built an application that could at least be user friendly (as an example: if you submit without some required field, everything you entered is reset) and it could have been an attempt to justify the budget spent.
Maybe it is best they just fire the one responsible for this decision. No motivation needed.
15. April 2009 at 19:58
That really is a disgrace .. and I thought that my design skills were bad ..
And with so little options to choose from, they can hardly give a correct advice to which provider you should choose..