BT Get Sky Broadband Ad Banned for “Fastest peak time speeds” Claim

A complaint by BT has caused the Advertising Standards Authority to ban a May 2015 press advert for Sky Broadband’s up to 38Mbps Sky Fibre (FTTC) service, which was found to have misleadingly claimed that it offered the “Fastest peak time speeds measured by Ofcom.”

BT complained that Sky’s advert, which based its claim on Ofcom’s last fixed broadband speeds report (here), was misleading because the original study had not taken into account Wi-Fi performance and the Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) data used in the report “had not been ‘normalised’ to take into account the distance from the exchange.”

The adverts small print also noted that Sky’s claim had been limited to a comparison that only involved similar FTTC based packages from BT, PlusNet and EE, which in our view rather ignores the rest of the market and all the other different broadband technologies available (e.g. Virgin Media’s cable and FTTH/P providers etc.).

ASA Ruling (REF: A15-303139)

We noted that the ad did not include any explicit claims about the speed of Sky’s Wi-Fi, but we considered that because many people used Wi-Fi in their homes, consumers were likely to interpret “fastest peak-time speeds” to mean the speeds they would receive in the home environment, including when they were using their devices wirelessly.

We understood that Ofcom’s findings were in relation to fixed-line broadband performance only and whilst we noted the footnote, which referred to “fixed-line broadband performance”, we considered it was not sufficiently prominent and did not make sufficiently clear that Wi-Fi performance was not included in the analysis. We noted Sky’s amendment to the ad, however, we considered that the new text was not sufficiently prominent to counter the misleading impression created by the headline claim.

We considered the report on wireless performance submitted by Sky. We noted that the testing had been carried out 18 months’ previously and we were concerned that some of the routers tested had, in the intervening period, been replaced by newer models. We were also concerned that Sky’s router had been compared with the routers of only three of its competitors and there were two notable competitors (which had been included in the Ofcom report) that were not included in the testing.

Furthermore, the focus of the report was on the reach of the products and measured the signal range from the router to the device and signal strength rather than speed. We also noted that a significantly larger number of tests had been carried out for Sky’s router than for those of its competitors and considered that could have had a bearing on the performance averages reported in the document. For those reasons, we considered that Sky had not adequately shown that its router performed better in terms of speed than those of its competitors.

Because the ad did not make clear that the “fastest peak time speeds” claim related to fixed-line broadband performance only, and therefore did not include Wi-Fi performance, we concluded that the claim was misleading.

As usual the ASA forced Sky to pull the advert in its current form (perhaps an exercise in futility since it was run nearly one year ago) and asked them to in future make “clear that speed claims related to fixed-line performance only, if that was the case.”