ASA Ban UK ISP Community Fibre’s “Misleading” Best Internet Provider Claims
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has banned a website promotion for London-focused broadband ISP CommunityFibre, which occurred after it was found to have misleadingly claimed to be both the “#1 rated internet provider on Trustpilot – with the most 5 star reviews” and “#1 Best ‘Internet Provider’“.
Just for some context. CommunityFibre has so far deployed their 5Gbps speed Fibre-to-the-Premises (FTTP) broadband network to serve 1.342 million homes (inc. 185k businesses within 200 metres of their network), albeit with the vast majority of that being present in London.
However, the ASA found that, when the companies in the same category as CommunityFibre were sorted by “highest number of reviews” on Trustpilot (at the time the promotions were seen – June 2025), two had a higher number of five-star reviews at over 182,000 and 65,000 five-star reviews respectively, compared to CommunityFibre that had over 60,000 five-star reviews.
Advertisement
ASA Ruling Ref: A25-1300873 Community Fibre Ltd
We understood that in order for Community Fibre to appear at the top of the list of ‘Internet providers’ on Trustpilot, the results had to be sorted by “Highest number of reviews” and the filters “4.5+ [stars]” and “London” had to be applied. This had the effect of filtering out a large number of Community Fibre’s competitors.
Whilst there were approximately 400 companies in the Trustpilot category “Internet provider”, when these filters were applied only 20 companies appeared. Moreover, when these filters were applied, although Community Fibre appeared at the top of the list of internet providers, another company which appeared beneath them in the list held a higher star rating.
Because the ads gave the impression that Community Fibre was the highest rated internet provider on Trustpilot when we understood that was not the case, we concluded the ads were misleading.
On that point, the ads breached CAP Code (Edition 12) rules 3.1 and 3.3 (Misleading advertising) and 3.7 (Substantiation).
As usual, the ASA banned the promotions in their current form and told CommunityFibre to “ensure they did not state or imply that they held the number one ranking, or had the most 5-star reviews, on third-party review websites if that was not the case“.
Mark is a professional technology writer, IT consultant and computer engineer from Dorset (England), he also founded ISPreview in 1999 and enjoys analysing the latest telecoms and broadband developments. Find me on X (Twitter), Mastodon, Facebook, BlueSky, Threads.net and Linkedin.
« Wessex Internet Builds Rural Broadband to 50k UK Premises as Revenues Rise
Advertisement
Leave a Reply
Privacy Notice: Please note that news comments are anonymous, which means that we do NOT require you to enter any real personal details to post a message and display names can be almost anything you like (provided they do not contain offensive language or impersonate a real persons legal name). By clicking to submit a post you agree to storing your entries for comment content, display name, IP and email in our database, for as long as the post remains live.
Only the submitted name and comment will be displayed in public, while the rest will be kept private (we will never share this outside of ISPreview, regardless of whether the data is real or fake). This comment system uses submitted IP, email and website address data to spot abuse and spammers. All data is transferred via an encrypted (https secure) session.
When I see any company describing themselves as “The Best” I immediately reach for the salt pot. The phrase is so ubiquitous in adverts it has become meaningless.
Yet the same ASA refused to do a formal investigation against Zen Internet for claiming the UKs most reliable broadband! They chose to give advice.
ASA give advice and if it is ignored it goes down formal route.
This does makes me wonder why any company needs to engineer claims if they are genuinely the best.
Kudos to their marketing team for trying but I fear this may not help the distrust consumers already have.
Isn’t this the same ASA who doesn’t even understand what fibre broadband is, in its misleading belief that copper VDSL is fibre?
No. The history of that saga is that Virgin advertised their HFC broadband as being fibre. BT complained and the ASA said that as much of the connection was fibre, the advert could stand. BT then responded by marketing their VDSL FTTC services as fibre. To not do that would have been to allow Virgin to keep their claim of HFC being fibre as a differentiator.
Problem is virgin isn’t affected by distance like vdsl fake fibre is
Sure virgin has had problems with overloading upstream in some areas and there fix was to give more users more upload speed to make the problem evem worse (until docsis 3.0 came witch fixed it because it uses more upstream channels and has more bandwidth per channel as well) for my street it was 1-2mb adsl that worked or have 80% packet loss between 3pm-8pm (was like that for 8 months and was only fixed due to docsis 3.0 upgrade) If vdsl was available I would habe switched (evenntgougjt it was only 25mb due to the distance to the cab)
The bduk money was spent on fttp virgin would habe been in real trouble 10 years ago ,, last month I now have access to real fibre on mybpole (unfortunately I renewed virgin last year)
Few people outside of these forums care about which technology delivers broadband. They mostly care about speed and price.
“I am literally the best human being in my provider area – as rated by JAT”**
**According to Just Thought (JAT) when measured on Thursday nights in the provider’s house boundaries, when wife is out.