ASA: BT's broadband not "unbeatable"

 

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By Stewart Mitchell

Posted on 18 Apr 2012 at 08:00

BT has been ordered not to run a series of adverts promoting its fibre services, after the advertising watchdog ruled the company could not back up its claims the service was “unbeatable”.

Following complaints from rival ISP Virgin Media, among others, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) investigated adverts for the Infinity fibre service.

The ads said: “Share photos and videos at unbeatable speeds. Do more online with three times faster fibre optic broadband.”

The adverts appeared across print, TV and online outlets, with Virgin Media and three other complainants challenging whether the "unbeatable" claims could be substantiated and whether they were misleading.

BT said the sharing claims referred to upload speeds, and said its fibre products did provide the fastest upstream connections - but the ASA disagreed.

“While we acknowledged BT's statement that the claim was a top parity claim, we noted we had not seen evidence that BT's download speeds were unbeatable, and concluded the claims in the ads had not been substantiated and were misleading,” the ruling said.

The ASA also said BT’s speeds related only to its faster Option 2 Infinity services, which at the time had upload speeds of up to 10Mbits/sec, but that the company had not made that clear.

In all, the ASA upheld four complaints about the adverts and told BT not to run them again.