Advert for Hull ISP Wisper Broadband Banned for Misleading Speeds

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has banned a website advert for the Hull (East Yorkshire) focused wireless ISP Wisper Broadband after it claimed to offer “Super Fast … speeds of between 10 and 20 MBPS day and night“, but at least one customer only received 1-3Mbps.

The little known provider initially defended its promotion, which was seen on 16th November 2015, by noting that various factors can impact on the speeds customers achieve, such as faulty equipment and routers that picked up interference from other domestic appliances.

Curiously the ISP then goes on to claim that “the term ‘superfast’ had no real definition … other than it being significantly faster than ADSL” when their website first when live in 2013, although at that point we recall that the Government had been using an official definition of 24Mbps+ for around two years. Wisper also claimed that most of their customers received speeds above 30Mbps, but they failed to provide any evidence of this.

ASA Ruling (REF: A15-320447)

“We acknowledged that various factors could affect the speeds which consumers could achieve and noted Wisper Broadband’s assertion that many of their customers received speeds in excess of 30 Mbit/s. However, Wisper Broadband had not provided any data to demonstrate that their customers achieved the headline speed of 10–20Mbit/s, let alone speeds in excess of 30Mbit/s.

Because Wisper Broadband had not provided evidence that consumers could achieve speeds of between 10 and 20Mbps throughout the day, or that those speeds were superfast and therefore significantly faster than ADSL or ‘standard’ broadband services, we concluded that the claims were misleading and had not been substantiated.”

As usual the ASA banned the advert and told Wisper Broadband not to promote or claim service speeds that could not be achieved or substantiated. A quick look at the website shows that the provider has stopped listing speeds and merely refers to their package(s) as being “super broadband“, which is about as informative as mud.

The fact that the promotion also used MBPS, which technically speaking means MegaBytes rather than Megabits, is sadly not something that the ASA picked up on.