One of BT's infamous 'Adam and Jane' adverts has been banned, with the Advertising Standards Agency upholding claims that it was likely to mislead customers about the speed of its 'up to' 20Mbps service.
BT's advert showed 'Jane' instantly loading a website and looking through images, while an estate agent was apologising to 'Adam' for the slowness of his connection.
"BT is rolling out up to 20 meg speeds to give you a consistently faster broadband throughout the day even at peak times," intoned a voiceover.
17 complaints – including ones from ISPs Virgin Media and Sky were made to the ASA, and despite BT's defence that its 20 meg service was faster than the old one, they were upheld.
"Likely to mislead"
"Because we had not seen sufficient evidence to support the claim that BT's new broadband service was consistently faster than its existing 8Mbps service even at peak times, we concluded that the ad was likely to mislead," said the ASA.
Of course, a more effective way to stop people being misled would be to ban the use of 'up to speeds' with ISPs forced to advertise packages by average speed and not potential top speeds that are rarely, if ever, hit.
Ofcom's recent look at the actual speeds showed that BT was among those whose average broadband speed was significantly lower than the 'up to' speed that the service is advertised as.
On BT's 'up to 20Mbps' service the average speed is less than half, with Ofcom's average suggesting a speed of around 6.1 to 7.6 Mbps.
Your comments (4) Click to add a new comment
anteaus
August 27th 2010
4. The issue here is that while a good phone line can handle 20MBps, the ISP's infrastructure cannot handle anything like 20MBps per subscriber, if all are online all at once.
This can mean that introducing higher line speeds actually makes the peak-time slowdowns worse than they were before, since a few very fast links can soak-up all of the available capacity.
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fellwalker
August 26th 2010
3. BUT Ofcom is still talking about connection speed, not usable speed.
I left BT because my 7Mbps dropped to under 1Mbps every evening between 19:30 and 23:30. (I suppose on average that is still 6Mbps over 24 hours!!!) My neighbour (who has no choice but a BT line as his work pays for his internet) is still getting that slow down.
When I rang BT yesterday, as our exchange is infiniti ready, I asked whether the new service was still likely to slow down in the evenings. Yes, we do restrict all our broadband connections at times because it is only fair to spread the available connectivity across all of our customers. I've never heard them admit it before. So I am not returning as 15Mbps is useless when we are not in the house.
BT support 18 months ago confirmed that the line itself was still at 7Mbps but refused to understand the slow down in real world browsing. So I left. With BeThere I get a consistent speed of 7Mbps, 24/24.
HOWEVER, the usable speed depends more and more on the far end - the web sites I am browsing and downloading from. Some slow, some fast.
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gr1mm4
August 25th 2010
2. Yawn indeed... I wish they would do something about the so called unlimited internet packages, which seem to have limits?
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russparkin
August 25th 2010
1. could they not axe the whole series of adverts based on this? really is boring now. and can you believe 1.5 million people voted for how the 'story' develops. yawn
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