T-Mobile has been told to stop publishing adverts for its mobile broadband service which suggest that mobile broadband is as good a service as that given by fixed line connections.
The mobile phone network has been ordered by advertising regulator the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) to stop publishing certain adverts because they broke its rules on truthfulness.
A T-Mobile leaflet advertised "Broadband on the go for £15 a month ... All the benefits of home broadband, on the move. No wires, no waiting, no worries..."
The ASA received a complaint claiming that the advert misleadingly suggested that T-Mobile's service was equivalent in speed and quality to a fixed line broadband service.
T-Mobile told the ASA that the ad had not made any technical comparison between the two kinds of service and that it had listed some of the popular web-related activities that were possible with the connection such as e-mail sending, blog writing and game playing.
The ASA found, though, that there were likely to be significant differences between the performance of mobile broadband when compared with fixed line services.
"We understood that mobile broadband was unlikely to offer speeds comparable with those of a high speed fixed-line service and that, due to the technology's reliance on obtaining a signal from mobile telephone networks it could not guarantee the same continuity of service," said its ruling on the ads.
The ASA said that readers of the leaflets might be confused by them.
"We considered that the claim "All the benefits of home broadband" was likely to lead readers to assume the level of service, including the speed, would be the same [as with fixed line broadband]," it said. "Because T-Mobile had not made clear in the ad that there were differences between home broadband services and mobile broadband services, particularly in terms of the potentially higher speeds of the former, and because we considered that that was likely to influence consumers' decision to subscribe to the service, we concluded that the ad was likely to mislead."
T-Mobile was told not to republish the ads.
Virgin Media was also told to change the way it advertised its broadband speeds by the ASA.
Virgin had issued posters and newspaper adverts claiming that it was the UK's fastest broadband service.
The ASA agreed with complaints it received that faster services were available and that the data used by Virgin could not be relied on to make those claims.
Virgin claimed that the claim that its 20 megabytes per second (Mb/s) service was the fastest was based not on a theoretical connectivity but on assessment of the actual connection speeds achieved by users.
The ASA said, though, that it believed that consumers would not understand the ad in those terms.
"We considered, however, that readers would be used to definitions of broadband speed in terms of download speeds and were therefore likely to understand the claim "fastest" as an absolute claim that implied it was not possible to obtain a broadband connection in the UK that permitted a faster maximum download speed than Virgins service," it said.
"We understood…that it was possible for users to obtain a broadband service with a faster maximum broadband download speed than 20 Mb, on an ADSL2+ based service, allowing speeds of up to 24 Mb," said the ASA. "Because we understood that it was possible in certain instances for some customers in optimum conditions to obtain a faster maximum broadband download speed than Virgins 20 Mb service, we concluded that such an absolute claim was misleading."
Complaints were also made about the way that the speeds were measured, which was by a company called Epitiro. The measurement services on which the claims were based were judged by the ASA not to be thorough enough to use as a basis for the advertised claims.
"Epitiro data did not cover the whole industry and concluded that Epitiro data could not be used to make such comparative speed claims, because it did not evaluate all broadband providers customer bases in a sufficiently random and significant way," said the ruling.
"Because we had not seen robust comparative evidence from all ISPs in the UK, the ads breached the Code," it said. Virgin was told not to republish the ads.
