ASA Orders EE to Drop the Broadband Claim from its Marketing Campaign

I often marvel at the fact that, when I’m watching a commercial, each company is always better than all the others—or so they claim. Everyone has a more reliable or biggest “this” than anyone else, or everyone has the fastest speed when compared to anyone else. If I’m not mistaken, these are all pieces of information that can have a validity check behind them.

The implication is that you can state anything you want in an advertisement and leave it up to the individual to believe it or not. That, however, does not seem to be the case in the U.K. Everything Everywhere, or EE as it is more commonly known, has been claiming in its latest direct mail promotion that it offers Britain’s most reliable broadband, stating "Introducing Britain's most reliable broadband for staying connected."

The ad also went on to say that its broadband is better than that provided by its rivals, which in the U.K. includes BT, Sky and TalkTalk. Apparently, this is something that BT took offense to and lodged a complaint with the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA).

The ASA is the U.K.’s independent regulator of advertising across all media. Their mission statement reads, “We apply the Advertising Codes, which are written by the Committees of Advertising Practice. Our work includes acting on complaints and proactively checking the media to take action against misleading, harmful or offensive advertisements.”

Two of the main issues in testing broadband reliability are jitter and latency. The simplest way to look at latency is that it is the delay time between when data is sent to a server and received by the sender. This is mainly a function of the signal’s travel and processing time at any nodes the information goes through.

Jitter is described as the undesired deviation from true periodicity of an assumed periodic signal in electronics and telecommunications, often in relation to a reference clock source. In other words, jitter is a glitch along the way that affects latency times.

EE’s reason for stating its claim is that its broadband is better because its service experienced less jitter and latency. The complaint that BT filed with the ASA was actually lodged in three separate objections to EE’s claim. The ad was misleading because of the following:

• could be substantiated, because they did not believe that the Ofcom report referred to included any direct measurement of connectivity
• could be substantiated, because for the two measurements cited, latency and jitter, EE did not score higher than BT to a statistically significant degree
• because it was not sufficiently clear that it related to fixed-line broadband only, rather than both fixed-line and wireless router performance

The third seems to be the real issue here. BT said that EE did not score more highly on jitter and latency measures, according to Ofcom and the ad did not make it clear that its claim only related to fixed-line broadband and not commonly used wireless routers.

In response, the ASA said "Because we considered that consumers would understand the claim to relate to reliability of a broadband connection, including fixed-line and wireless router performance and EE had not provided sufficient evidence to substantiate the claim, we concluded that it was misleading.”

The ASA concluded that “The ad must not appear in its current form again. We told EE to ensure they held sufficient evidence to substantiate their claims in future."