ASA bans BT broadband ad for misleading about speed

The UK’s advertising watchdog has banned BT’s latest TV broadband advertisement, following claims the communications giant was making “unrealistic” claims about the speed of its broadband service.


BT’s advert showed ‘Jane’ instantly loading a website and looking through images, while an estate agent was apologising to ‘Adam’ for the slowness of his connection.
“BT is rolling out up to 20 meg speeds to give you a consistently faster broadband throughout the day even at peak times,” intoned a voiceover.
The Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) investigated BT’s claim that its new 20Mbps service is “consistently faster” than other leading broadband providers following 17 complaints, including challenges from rivals BSkyB, TalkTalk and Virgin Media.
The ASA ruled against BT, concluding that: “Because we had not seen sufficient evidence to support the claim that BT’s new broadband service was consistently faster than its existing 8Mb service even at peak times, we concluded that the ad was likely to mislead.”
Ofcom’s recent look at the actual speeds showed that BT was among those whose average broadband speed was significantly lower than the ‘up to’ speed that the service is advertised as.
On BT’s ‘up to 20Mbps’ service the average speed is less than half, with Ofcom’s average suggesting a speed of around 6.1 to 7.6 Mbps.
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