At last the hoax of advertising unrealistic broadband speeds is being taken seriously. The Communications Consumer Panel is asking Advertising Standards, the advertising watchdog, to monitor advertised rates.
The problem to date has been that Broadband Providers will advertise something like, “up to 10 Mbytes download speeds”. Such a statement can easily mislead the consumer into believeing that 10 Mbytes is at least occasionally achieved.
But this isn’t the case.
‘Up to’ can literally mean that the network is ‘capable’ of that speed but not necessarilly delivering it.
A recent study showed that most networks were regularly 40/50% slower than the advertised speed with NONE every actually achieving the ‘Up To’ speed. Virgin was the closest to delivering what it promised with the 10 Mbyte service regularly achieving 9.8Mbytes. Well done Virgin.
This is clearly a case for Advertising Standards to clean up and I really don’t know what the fuss is because this is a clear case of misleading the public.
And Advertiing Standards has the power to stop such adverting immediately.
