ASA UK Ban BT Adverts for Misleading Guaranteed WiFi Claims

Complaints from UK broadband ISPs Virgin Media, Vodafone and 11 people have resulted in several adverts for BT’s Complete WiFi (mesh system) service add-on being banned for misleadingly claiming that “only we guarantee wi-fi in every room” and “we guarantee a strong signal in every room.”

The complaints focused on two TV adverts, a press advert and a BT website promotion – all were seen in January 2019 (an old case by even ASA standards). On top of that three other people also successfully complained that one of the TV adverts for this paid add-on service, which showed somebody placing Wi-Fi discs (repeaters) around a house, didn’t clearly depict that the discs also needed to be plugged in.

In their defence BT said that they had “carried out extensive coverage testing prior to launch on a trial base of over 1000 homes” to support their claims and they added that there was only “one occasion” where they gave a customer £20 off their following bill (part of the WiFi coverage guarantee) on the basis that “they could not get Wi-Fi in every room.”

On the subject of needed to plug the WiFi repeaters into a wall socket, BT felt that “consumers generally understood that electrical items such as routers and televisions needed to be plugged in.” The ASA disagreed with BT’s defence and upheld all of the complaints.

ASA Ruling (REF: G19-1018045)

We acknowledged that the homes tested were comprised of a variety of different types of houses (detached, semi-detached, mid-terrace, flat/apartments and bungalows) and a variety of different building materials (brick, concrete and stone). However, we were concerned that there appeared to be no reliable, reproducible methodology whereby each room or the further points from the router were tested, with no data reporting which rooms of the house had been tested. The evidence did not show what speeds were being achieved on the devices, so we were unable to verify that the signal was strong enough to provide the minimum speed needed to carry out typical online activities.

Furthermore, no data was provided about the devices tested meaning that we couldn’t be sure that a representative range of devices were able to achieve a sufficient signal, whereas no data was provided about the time of day that the devices were tested meaning that we also couldn’t verify that every room of the house was able to achieve a strong Wi-Fi signal at peak times. BT also provided us with information from in-life data analytics and results from their test house. While we acknowledged that the test house data showed a huge increase in speed after one Wi-Fi disc was introduced, we could not verify from the test house data, which did not test for interference, or the in-life data that adequate speeds were consistently being achieved, including at peak times, in every room of the customers’ homes (i.e. in homes of every different layout and size).

Because the evidence provided was insufficient to prove that, barring exceptional circumstances, BT’s Complete Wi-Fi guaranteed every customer would be able to obtain a sufficient Wi-Fi signal in each room of their house, we concluded that the claim “only we guarantee wi-fi in every room” could not be substantiated, and was therefore misleading.

…

We noted that the [TV] ad featured a man walking up the stairs with a Wi-Fi disc in his hand and placing it on a cabinet. The ad then briefly focused on the disc on top of the cabinet. There were no visible wires attached to the disc in the man’s hand or when shown on top of the cabinet. We considered that the product was one that consumers could reasonably believe could be battery powered, and accordingly be placed anywhere around the home rather than only in locations that were near a plug socket. We therefore concluded that consumers were likely to be misled from the ad into thinking that the Wi-Fi discs could operate without needing to be plugged into a plug socket.

As usual the ASA banned BT’s adverts and told them “not to claim that they guaranteed Wi-Fi in every room unless they held adequate evidence to support the claims.” On top of that they warned the ISP “not to use visuals that suggested the Wi-Fi discs did not need to be plugged into a socket.”

Admittedly the damage is arguably long since done and the adverts themselves stopped being run a long time ago. Likewise we should point out that this is NOT the first time that BT has been in trouble for making misleading claims about their WiFi performance (here). In fairness almost all of their major broadband rivals have – at one time or another – also been in trouble for making similarly misleading claims about WiFi.

We think it would be best for everybody if all providers just avoided making any overly bold claims about WiFi performance. Such networks and devices are highly variable in their coverage and performance due to many different factors.

UPDATE 9:53am

We’ve had a response from BT, which attempts to put a different twist on the ASA’s ruling and what it means for them.

A Spokesperson for BT said:

“We guarantee that our Complete Wi-Fi customers will get Wi-Fi in every room. Unlike other providers we send our customers a new Smart Hub 2 and Wi-Fi Disc which gets a strong wi-fi signal to every room for the majority of customers across the UK.

We also go the extra mile for customers living in the biggest homes and we will happily send more Wi-Fi Discs and arrange for an engineer to visit if needed – we will always help our customers to get wi-fi to every room.

The ASA wants us to explain more clearly that we’ll also send customers £20 if they’re still not happy and we’ve changed our ads to make that more clear.”