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BT broadband ad 'misleads' consumers
Thursday 26th August 2010, by Daniel King
BT has been told to pull a misleading advert for its new high speed connection.
The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has upheld complaints that the company's new 20Mb service is unlikely to be faster than its current 8Mb service.
Complaints made by viewers and other broadband providers including Sky and Virgin included the unfeasible loading times and the lack of evidence for BT's claims.
"Because we had not seen sufficient evidence to support the claim that BT's new broadband service was consistently faster than its existing 8Mb service even at peak times, we concluded that the ad was likely to mislead", ASA commented.
In addition to this, the roll-out of the service is expected to take two years, by which time only three-quarters (75 per cent) of the country would be able to receive it.
ASA also calculated that "less than half" of UK households would be able to have immediate access to the new service.
However, BT have said that the advert was intended to "highlight" the existence of the service during its roll-out and was not meant to mislead consumers in any way.
Last month, research from Ofcom found that there was still a considerable gap between advertised speeds and actual speeds.
Despite almost one in four connections having advertised speeds of up to 10Mb/second, the average broadband connection speed is 5.2MMb/second.
Only 58 per cent of advertised speeds in April 2009 were found to be accurate by the industry regulator.
Categories: BT
