ASA UK Ban Virgin Media’s Misleading Fastest WiFi Guarantee Claims

A complaint by Vodafone has prompted the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) to investigate and ultimately ban a series of adverts for Virgin Media’s (VMO2) UK broadband ISP products after some of them “misleadingly” claimed to be offering the “fastest WiFi Guarantee of any major provider“.

Just to recap. The original guarantee first launched in September 2022 (here) and made headlines by claiming to deliver the “UK’s Fastest WiFi Guarantee” (with a 20Mbps minimum speed) in “every room or money back.” But this ignored that fact that, at the time, one rival network operator – Connect Fibre – had, in June 2022, already made a similar claim by promising a minimum speed of 30 Mbps in every room (here) for the same price.

The debate then took another turn in July 2023 when Sky Broadband launched the “UK’s fastest WiFi guarantee, of any major provider” with their “WiFi Max’s speed guarantee of up to 25mps in every room” for an extra £10 per month (here). Virgin Media then promptly responded to that (here) by boosting their guarantee to 30Mbps at no extra cost (i.e. a minimum download of 30Mbps via WiFi in every room, or get £100 back).

Since then Virgin Media have been continuing to use the “fastest WiFi guarantee” claim, albeit more recently tweaked to be promoted as the “fastest WiFi Guarantee of any major provider” to avoid running into a conflict with smaller networks. But crucially, such guarantees aren’t just about speed, they can also differ in what the guarantee actually gives back to consumers (credits, solutions etc.), which can be harder to compare and this is partly where Virgin Media’s ads went wrong.

Nevertheless, broad performance claims like this have a long history of being banned by the ASA, and so today’s decision to uphold a related complaint should not come as much of a surprise.

ASA Ruling REF: A23-1206573 Virgin Media Ltd

Virgin Media had explained that rather than being a claim that they offered the fastest WiFi, the claim related to their “Wifi Guarantee”, which meant that customers with WiFi Max would be sent up to three signal boosting WiFi pods if they did not obtain download speeds of at least 30 Mbps in every room. If that was unsuccessful, they would receive a one off credit of £100. Other broadband providers also offered similar Wifi guarantees, but they related to speeds of less than 30 Mbps. Virgin Media therefore considered the claim was not misleading. On that basis, they did not provide comparative evidence about the speed of their WiFi and that of the other major providers.

We considered that while some consumers may have been aware of WiFi guarantees, many would not. The difference between guaranteeing the highest speed and offering a guarantee which promised action by the advertiser if a minimum speed was not met was a subtle one and required clear explanation to ensure that consumers were not misled about what was being offered.

We did not consider that the headline claim “Get the fastest WiFi Guarantee of any major provider” would have been understood as Virgin Media intended by consumers, and that, as set out above, a significant proportion would understand it to mean that Virgin Media guaranteed they offered the fastest WiFi service of any major broadband provider.

We acknowledged that the ad included further information about the WiFi guarantee which sought to provide more detail on what they were guaranteeing and how the guarantee worked. However, we considered that this was insufficient to override the impression from the claim that Virgin Media offered the fastest WiFi of the major providers.

We also noted that a box immediately underneath the headline claim “Get the fastest WiFi Guarantee of any major provider” at the top of the page invited users to input their postcode and click to “Check availability”, and that consumers were therefore encouraged to take action on the basis of the claim, notwithstanding that qualifying information appeared underneath. We considered that the headline claim should have been more clearly worded and immediately qualified to ensure that consumers understood the nature of the guarantee.

Therefore, because the claim had not been substantiated as it would be understood by consumers, we concluded that the ad was misleading.

As usual, the ASA told Virgin Media not to show the ads again in their current form and to ensure that they did not imply that they guaranteed the fastest WiFi service of all major broadband providers if that was not the case. The provider began responding to this earlier in the month and has since been switching out claims like “get the fastest WiFi Guarantee of any major provider” for more generic wording, such as “get fast, reliable WiFi gliding through every room or money back“.

In response, Virgin Media have said they’re “surprised and disappointed” by the ruling, as well as finding it “slightly baffling“, but they’d be incredibly ignorant if this really did come as a surprise. The ASA has a long and well documented history of slamming overly broad “we’re the best“, the “fastest” or “most reliable” style claims in ads (search our news), often for a variety of reasons. The simplest solution would be for providers to just avoid them, but the lure of marketing is often too great and, in fairness, Virgin’s guarantee is a pretty good offer.