The Advertising Standards Authority has upheld three complaints against Vodafone for claims made in its advertising of mobile broadband.
The adjudication, published on Wednesday, said Vodafone had no basis for saying that its mobile broadband service was the fastest or most reliable in the UK, or that it was "light years ahead". The complaints against Vodafone's ads had been made by rival operators T-Mobile and 3.
The two advertisements in question showed a USB stick as a rocket in space and included the line: "The fastest, most reliable mobile broadband in the galaxy". Both of the claims included in this sentence were successfully challenged.
Vodafone told the ASA it had based these claims on nationwide speed and reliability averages that came out of an independent network benchmarking trial, carried out by a firm called LCC International. The ASA, however, said it noted that competing networks "had not been tested an equal number of times for each test", and said the "most reliable" claim was misleading "because the ads did not make clear the basis of the claims, [so] it would not be clear to readers how the claims had been measured".
The ASA also noted that the "fastest" claim was not borne out by the LCC testing. "We noted that, in six out of the 10 regions of the UK tested, one of the other networks had a faster average time to download a web page than Vodafone," the adjudication read.
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The third complaint to the ASA surrounded Vodafone's use of the text "mobile broadband that's light years ahead" in the advertisements. Vodafone's defence to the ASA included the suggestion that the text was not intended to suggest significant technological superiority over its rivals' networks, but rather just to fit in with the rocket imagery.
The ASA disagreed, saying the claim was one of superiority, and — given the lack of support for the two other claims made elsewhere in the advertisements' text — was "misleading".
The standards authority has banned any future publication of the advertisements in question.
