TalkTalk UK ISP Adverts Banned for Breaking Fixed Price Promise

The UK Advertising Standards Authority has banned a TV and email advert for ISP TalkTalk’s home broadband packages, which occurred after they were found to have misleadingly pledged “no mid-contract rises” on supposedly “fixed” price plans, only to later increase their prices during the fixed contract period.

In today’s market, it’s not unusual for broadband ISPs to promote fixed price plans with no mid-contract price increases as a selling point. In this case the issue centres around two of TalkTalk’s packages, one of which (“Faster Fibre” [FTTC]) was promoted on TV in March 2020 alongside the “fixed until 2022” line about pricing, while an email advert seen in January 2020 used the more overt – “No mid-contract rises on your Fixed Price Plan.”

A total of 9 people – seemingly including those who signed-up as a result of the adverts – complained about the promotion because they were later “informed that the price of their broadband packages was to increase during the fixed contract period,” which is something that we have covered before (here and here).

In response, TalkTalk essentially blamed the COVID-19 pandemic for pushing up data usage beyond their expectations (i.e. increasing the cost of service delivery because so many people were stuck at home, gobbling more data). Funnily enough, other ISPs seemed able to handle the situation, and without breaking their promise to customers. Predictably, the ASA upheld the complaints.

ASA Ruling REF: G21-1102554 TalkTalk Telecom Ltd

We acknowledged the increase in the usage of the network during the Covid-19 pandemic was unlikely to have been foreseen at the time the ads were seen. However, we disagreed with TalkTalk that consumers would not expect to pay a fixed price for the level of usage seen during the lockdowns. Consumers had agreed a price for their broadband to be delivered with a particular speed, to be used as required, and they would expect that price to be honoured.

Consumers were likely to understand that some limitations would exist in many cases to advertising claims, and we agreed that a one-off incident would not undermine a general claim such as ‘next-day’ delivery, for example. However, in the context of the price of a contract which was described as ‘fixed’, we considered that consumers would expect to be able to rely on that price during the period for which it was claimed to be fixed.

Because the ads claimed that the price of the contracts would be fixed for 24 months, and ad (b) claimed that there would be no mid-contract price rises, when that was not the case, we concluded that the ads were likely to mislead.

Naturally, the ASA banned TalkTalk’s adverts and warned them “not to claim that prices were ‘fixed’ or that there would be no mid-contract price rises if that was not the case.” The ISP has already been criticised for all of this before, so we suspect that most of the damage here has already been done, and the ASA ruling will thus come as more of a reminder.