Sky gripes about BT’s “faster broadband speeds” fib, ad watchdog agrees

A cheetah, a hula-hoop man, and a fly catcher walk into being barred.

Kelly Fiveash – May 4, 2016 12:00 am | 5

Credit: BT

BT has been rapped by the UK’s advertising regulator, after it misled would-be customers with unsubstantiated claims that its broadband service offered better speeds than its rivals—Virgin Media and Sky.

In a series of TV commercials, featuring a cheetah, a topless hula-hoop man, and a chap catching flies with chopsticks, BT suggested that its broadband was “super responsive” for gaming, and “super smooth” for video when compared to Virgin Media’s service.

Sky’s broadband service, meanwhile, was inferior to the download speeds available on BT’s Infinity fibre optic offering, the telecoms giant crowed in its ad, which ran in October last year.

All three of the adverts were successfully challenged by complainants, however.

Virgin Media didn’t gripe about the claims levelled against its broadband service, thereby leaving it to a member of the public to report “no difference in their user experience,” according to the Advertising Standards Authority’s ruling.

Sky, though, did hit out at BT for failing to substantiate its claim that Infinity offered faster download speeds.

In a lengthy ruling, the ASA agreed that BT had misled folk with its claims against Sky and Virgin Media.

BT had attempted to defend its ads by stating that its Infinity 2 service “provided faster upload speeds than Virgin Media and that BT Infinity 2 was unbeatable against Virgin Media for latency, downstream jitter and packet loss,” the ASA noted. The telco had also hoped to brush aside concerns about its smoother download speeds for video claim by showering the ad regulator with its own testing methodology.

The ASA was unimpressed, however. It said:

The speed and quality of the entire connection from the network to the device would be positively correlated with the individual speed and quality of these elements, but BT had not demonstrated that the entirety of its connection was faster and of higher quality for gaming or video calling than provided by Virgin Media.

On BT’s claim that Sky’s download speeds were inferior, the ASA concluded: “We considered that, because not all the necessary data and results were available, the information provided was not sufficient to ensure the details of the comparison could be verified by consumers and competitors, and concluded that the ad breached the code.”

BT has been told that the TV ads must not appear again in their current form.