The Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) has upheld a complaint against an NTL teleshopping broadcast, which claimed their 300Kbps broadband service to be 5 times faster than 56Kbps dialup. Sadly NTL didn’t factor in the 150Kbps upload speed.

The broadcast stated that ntl’s 300Kbps broadband was “more than 5 times faster than standard 56K dial-up internet”. When listing the services that would be faster using ntl’s broadband, the presenter said “e-mail your friends and family all around the world a lot faster, in fact five times faster”.

Typically the upload speed of a standard v.92 56Kbps dialup modem is almost the same as the download, thus NTL was found at fault because its 300Kbps service had an upload speed limited to 150Kbps (closer to 3 x faster).

Naturally this also impacted the e-mail claim in the same way, since it would only apply to reception and not sending.

The ASA notes that this adjudication will now be applied to all ISP advertising, so providers should be aware of their products upload speed when making such claims.