ASA Ban TalkTalk UK ISP Adverts for Misleading Better WiFi Claims

Budget ISP TalkTalk has become the third broadband provider this year to have several adverts banned by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) over misleading claims about the WiFi performance of their bundled router hardware, which occurred after a complaint by BT prompted the watchdog to investigate.

Accurately benchmarking the performance of wireless networking technology is notoriously difficult, although that has never stopped ISPs from trying to claim that their kit is better than the others. Indeed so far this year we’ve already seen several adverts being banned for Sky Broadband’s Q Hub (here) and BT’s Smart Hub (here) devices for just that reason.

In this latest example BT complained to the ASA that a TV, radio and website advert for TalkTalk’s broadband service had made several claims that could not be substantiated, not least by promising potential customers that they “won’t get a better Wi-Fi signal from any of the other big providers” or “a Wi-Fi signal that can’t be beaten by any of the other big providers.”

In its defence TalkTalk said they did conduct a number of tests to check the router’s performance against rival devices and “did not believe consumers would understand the claim to be solely based on how far a signal reached.” The ASA found fault with both of these and upheld the complaint.

ASA Ruling (REF: A18-469302)

We sought advice from Ofcom regarding the evidence submitted by TalkTalk. The testing was only carried out in one test house with no accompanying tests in real consumer homes. We considered that it was in principle acceptable to only conduct tests in test houses as they could create a set of standardised, reproducible conditions.

However, they needed to demonstrate that the environment was typical of normal use and conditions, for instance by reflecting the level of interference in real consumer homes. In this case, however, only co-channel interference from one other Wi-Fi network was tested for, while TalkTalk had not tested for any forms of non-Wi-Fi interference that would be present in consumers’ homes.

We therefore considered that the tests were insufficient to reflect the interference that typically occurred in everyday homes. Furthermore, no recording of the levels of Wi-Fi interference at the time each router was tested had been provided, meaning that we were unable to verify that all the routers tested were subjected to consistent levels of interference.

We also noted that the routers were only positioned facing one direction, and were not rotating (for instance on turntables) when the Wi-Fi signal was being tested. Therefore, we could not be certain that the reported performance differences between the routers only occurred at the specific angle at which they had been placed. Because the evidence was insufficient to demonstrate that TalkTalk’s router’s provided as strong a signal as any other major provider, we concluded that the claims … had not been substantiated, and were therefore misleading.

As usual the adverts were all banned in their current form and the advertising watchdog told TalkTalk not to make comparative claims about their router in future based on “inadequate testing,” which is something they would know already if they’d bothered to read up on the ASA’s prior rulings against similar claims by other ISPs.

In fairness TalkTalk’s W-Fi Hub router is definitely one of the more capable bundled devices you can receive from a provider today but proving that requires a lot more effort on the part of an ISP. Furthermore ISPs are constantly updating their kit and as a result such claims, even when proven true, tend to have a rather limited half-life. We’re expecting new routers from Virgin Media and Sky Broadband soon.