Watchdog puts brakes on BT Infinity ads

The Advertising Standards Authority has upheld four complaints against the advertising of BT's super-fast Infinity broadband service on the grounds that they could be misleading.

The ASA said on Wednesday that it had investigated four complaints about BT's advertising of its Infinity broadband packages — which appeared in print, online and on television — put forward by rival broadband provider Virgin Media.

Virgin Media questioned whether the claims that the service was "unbeatable" could be substantiated. It also said they were misleading as they did not state which speed was available on which package.

Virgin also contested the wording of adverts, which said "do more online with three times faster fibre optic broadband". Virgin said the claim was misleading and could not be substantiated, because it did not believe BT's speeds were faster for all of the activities suggested, such as uploading or downloading photos. In addition, Virgin complained that "four times faster broadband" could be misleading because no basis for comparison was given.

Following the ASA's decisions, BT has been banned from showing the ads in their same form again.

Update 16:30:BT supplied the following statement in response to the ASA's ruling:

"BT is disappointed that the ASA has made this judgement based on a somewhat pedantic interpretation of the adverts. We don't feel that any customers will have been misled by the claims in these ads, which sought to highlight, on the basis of Ofcom speed reports, that Infinity offers download speeds three times as fast as the UK average and offers upload speed which are equal to anything offered by any other ISP."