BT UK Broadband ISP Ad Banned for Misleading Full Fibre Claim

The UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has banned a poster advert for BT’s Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) based ultrafast broadband service after it was found to have “misleadingly” claimed to offer “more reliable speeds” than a similar package on Virgin Media’s network in the Bristol area.

The poster advert itself, which was specific to the Bristol area during January 2020 and is something we’ve touched on before (here), contained text that told locals “Don’t settle for Virgin” and promised “Ultrafast Full Fibre with more reliable speeds than Virgin M200 and M350.” The comparison appears to have been set against BT’s then rival 300Mbps FTTP tier (this happened prior to BT launching their new 500Mbps and 1Gbps plans).

Naturally, this prompted Virgin Media to complain the advert was “misleading” and that BT had failed to substantiate it with locally sourced test data. BT responded by highlighting how Ofcom’s annual UK Home Broadband performance study had allegedly showed that their “customers received the speed they paid for more of the time than if they used the Virgin M200 and M350 services“.

In the end the ASA primarily found the advert to be misleading because BT had failed to make clear that their performance claim was made on the basis of national data, rather than data specific to the Bristol area. This was partly supported by feedback from Ofcom, which noted that “in some localised circumstances it was possible for cable services to perform comparably to full fibre services” and thus it was not considered appropriate to extrapolate the report’s findings to apply in the Bristol area.

ASA Ruling (REF: A20-1053191 British Telecommunications plc)

“Virgin highlighted that CAP Guidance on speed claims stated that the selection of areas tested should be representative of the target audience and a campaign targeted at a specific area might use data from tests carried out in that area. However, we considered that the guidance on speed claims, which was written with part-fibre and ADSL services in mind, was not applicable to claims about a full fibre service’s reliability. We understood that, like full fibre, the speed of cable services did not depend on distance from the local exchange or the nearest street cabinet, as was the case with other forms of part-fibre and ADSL services.

A Connected Nations Ofcom report also summarised that increased capacity of full fibre services meant that they provided consistent speeds that would not depend on congestion at peak times due to other users, which was not the case for part fibre (which included cable) and ASDL services. Nevertheless, we considered that, because the claim was a localised one, referring specifically to Bristol, and the ad did not make clear that the claim was based on national data, BT would need to demonstrate that the report’s findings could be applied on a local level in order to support the claim.

We consulted Ofcom, who explained that the UK Home Broadband Performance report indicated that, in general terms, cable services varied more in terms of speed and other performance metrics than other broadband networks, including full fibre services, at a national level. However, because in some localised circumstances it was possible for cable services to perform comparably to full fibre services, they did not consider it appropriate to extrapolate from the report’s findings that the cable services available to a particular local geographical area or group of users would display greater variability than full fibre services.

We therefore considered that the ad should have made clear that the claim was made on the basis of national data, in order to avoid misleading consumers. We therefore concluded that the ad was misleading.”

Technical comparisons between different network technologies, packages and locations can be fraught with difficulty due to the large number of different factors that can influence how a network performs. On the one hand you could argue that BT’s (Openreach) FTTP technology in January 2020, on comparable packages, was capable of offering superior upload speeds and faster latency times than Virgin Media’s Hybrid Fibre Coax service (note: back then VM were still mostly on the EuroDOCSIS 3.0 and not the DOCSIS 3.1 standard).

On the other hand, a smaller slice of Virgin Media’s network is also FTTP based and there’s also no accounting for other issues, such as localised network capacity / congestion in each operator’s network, as well as faults or network availability (a service isn’t faster if you can’t even get it), which can have a big impact upon area specific performance. Suffice to say that making broad performance claims like BT’s can be tricky, especially when extrapolating national data to a specific location. There will always be areas where both operators deliver poor speeds on even their top packages.

As usual the ASA has told BT not to run the advert again and to ensure that future such claims did not mislead by omitting the fact that they related to data on a national level. Virgin Media also complained that BT’s advert had “misleadingly omitted information on which of BT’s services were being compared against those of Virgin Media,” although the ASA did NOT uphold that gripe as they considered the mention of a 300Mbps speed to be “within the range of the Virgin services stated in the ad.”