The mobile phone network has been ordered by
advertising regulator the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) to
stop publishing certain adverts because they broke its rules on
truthfulness.
A T-Mobile leaflet advertised "Broadband on the go for £15 a
month ... All the benefits of home broadband, on the move. No
wires, no waiting, no worries..."
The ASA received a complaint claiming that the advert
misleadingly suggested that T-Mobile's service was equivalent in
speed and quality to a fixed line broadband service.
T-Mobile told the ASA that the ad had not made any technical
comparison between the two kinds of service and that it had listed
some of the popular web-related activities that were possible with
the connection such as e-mail sending, blog writing and game
playing.
The ASA found, though, that there were likely to be significant
differences between the performance of mobile broadband when
compared with fixed line services.
"We understood that mobile broadband was unlikely to offer
speeds comparable with those of a high speed fixed-line service and
that, due to the technology's reliance on obtaining a signal from
mobile telephone networks it could not guarantee the same
continuity of service," said its ruling on the ads.
The ASA said that readers of the leaflets might be confused by
them.
"We considered that the claim "All the benefits of home
broadband" was likely to lead readers to assume the level of
service, including the speed, would be the same [as with fixed line
broadband]," it said. "Because T-Mobile had not made clear in the
ad that there were differences between home broadband services and
mobile broadband services, particularly in terms of the potentially
higher speeds of the former, and because we considered that that
was likely to influence consumers' decision to subscribe to the
service, we concluded that the ad was likely to mislead."
T-Mobile was told not to republish the ads.
Virgin Media was also told to change the way it advertised its
broadband speeds by the ASA.
Virgin had issued posters and newspaper adverts claiming that it
was the UK's fastest broadband service.
The ASA agreed with complaints it received that faster services
were available and that the data used by Virgin could not be relied
on to make those claims.
Virgin claimed that the claim that its 20 megabytes per second
(Mb/s) service was the fastest was based not on a theoretical
connectivity but on assessment of the actual connection speeds
achieved by users.
The ASA said, though, that it believed that consumers would not
understand the ad in those terms.
"We considered, however, that readers would be used to
definitions of broadband speed in terms of download speeds and were
therefore likely to understand the claim "fastest" as an absolute
claim that implied it was not possible to obtain a broadband
connection in the UK that permitted a faster maximum download speed
than Virgins service," it said.
"We understood…that it was possible for users to obtain a
broadband service with a faster maximum broadband download speed
than 20 Mb, on an ADSL2+ based service, allowing speeds of up to 24
Mb," said the ASA. "Because we understood that it was possible in
certain instances for some customers in optimum conditions to
obtain a faster maximum broadband download speed than Virgins 20 Mb
service, we concluded that such an absolute claim was
misleading."
Complaints were also made about the way that the speeds were
measured, which was by a company called Epitiro. The measurement
services on which the claims were based were judged by the ASA not
to be thorough enough to use as a basis for the advertised
claims.
"Epitiro data did not cover the whole industry and concluded
that Epitiro data could not be used to make such comparative speed
claims, because it did not evaluate all broadband providers
customer bases in a sufficiently random and significant way," said
the ruling.
"Because we had not seen robust comparative evidence from all
ISPs in the UK, the ads breached the Code," it said. Virgin was
told not to republish the ads.
