ASA UK Ban TalkTalk’s Misleading Fibre Upgrade Email Adverts

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has banned two email adverts for TalkTalk’s ISP after they “misleadingly” told customers that “your usage is affecting your broadband service” and “you’ve hit your limit 3 times in 30 days” before recommending an upgrade to “fibre“, even though neither user was at such a “limit“.

The provider’s emails, which were sent in February and March 2019 (i.e. as usual the damage had already been done), appears to have been targeting TalkTalk’s remaining pool of ADSL (copper line) broadband subscribers and encouraging them to upgrade to their faster fibre based (FTTC, G.fast etc.) services.

At this point our readers will note that the ISP has long since been offering “unlimited” usage packages and as such any suggestion that a customer’s line was “at capacity” will have caused some confusion. The reason for this is because TalkTalk chose to define capacity as “the maximum amount of data the line could provide at any particular time.”

The definition is an unusual one since a customer who makes full use of their service “at peak times” may just be making fairly normal use of their connection, which is particularly true on slower lines where it’s easy to harness all your download and upload speed. Granted upgrading to a faster service would help but that’s a matter of personal preference and this probably isn’t the best way to promote such a thing.

ASA Ruling (REF: G19-1018317)

In the case of ad (b) this was further illustrated by a bar chart indicating the dates on which the complainant’s broadband was “At capacity”. However, we understood that neither complainants’ internet usage resulted in them reaching the maximum amount of data their lines could provide. Rather, the email was sent to customers who had reached two-thirds of their line’s bandwidth capacity twice in a 30-day period.

In the case of ad (b) we understood that the days on which the graph indicated the recipient was “At capacity” were days on which they had reached the two-thirds limit. We acknowledged that ad (b) included text at the bottom of the email which stated “30 day usage data: days reaching line limit calculated on your daily data usage and average customer data usage patterns, assumes more than 66% of line capacity used”. However, we did not consider this would override the overall impression of the ad that consumers had reached their data capacity.

We had not seen evidence that the complainants had reached their data capacity, therefore because the claims had not been substantiated, we concluded the ads were misleading.

As usual the ASA banned the adverts and told TalkTalk “not to imply that their customers were closer to reaching their broadband data capacity than was actually the case.“