BT advert ban not because of 'up to' speed claims

Although advertising watchdog, the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), has banned a BT broadband advert as misleading, it said this should not be seen as the start of a clampdown against ‘up to’ broadband speed claims.

In a TV advert featuring the characters Adam and Jane, a voiceover said that BT was "rolling out ‘up to’ 20Mbits/sec speeds" to give "consistently faster broadband".
However, although the ASA told Computeractive that it had not seen sufficient evidence to support BT’s claim, the 'up to' part of the statement was not the reason for the ban.

The ASA said: "Because we had not seen sufficient evidence to support the claim that BT's new broadband service was consistently faster than its existing 8Mbits/sec service even at peak times, we concluded that the ad was likely to mislead."

It did say that the use of the controversial 'up to' claim, used by many internet service providers (ISPs) to advertise their broadband services, was being examined by the Committee of Advertising Practice (CAP) and the Broadcast Committee of Advertising Practice (BCAP).

These are the two bodies that write and maintain advertising codes of practice that are administered by the ASA. CAP is responsible for the non-broadcast Code and BCAP is responsible for the TV and radio codes.

In July when communications regulator Ofcom released its latest broadband speed report, it said this was an area that ASA, CAP and BCAP needed to address.

A representative for the ASA said it was unlikely that that CAP and BCAP would come to any decision on the 'up to' claims this year.

BT said it was disappointed by the ASA's adjudication.

In a statement the ISP said: “We were concerned by a number of factors in the ASA's adjudication, for example, that not all customers could achieve consistently faster speeds. This was based on the fact that less than one per cent could not do this.

“The ASA also commented that we should adjust our data to allow for differing line lengths. Had we done this in the way suggested it would have increased our lead over other firms.”