An advert in BT's long-running "Adam and Jane" campaign was banned for misleading customers over the speed of the company's broadband.
The Advertising Standards Association snarled at the advert which showed Adam being shown around a property by an estate agent as he talked to Jane on his mobile, who was viewing the house online from her
home computer. In the advert the estate agent waited for a webpage to load, while Jane loaded the website instantly and quickly looked at a series of images.
The estate agent said that since it was six o'clock half the world was online. A voice over added that BT was rolling out up to 20 meg speeds to give you a consistently faster broadband throughout the day even at peak times. The ad drew 17 complaints from the public and competitors Sky, TalkTalk and Virgin, among them that the 20Mb (megabits per second) claim was misleading.
Surfing a typical website would not be any faster with a 20Mb service than it would with the original 8Mb service, while three people said the speed at which Jane navigated various web pages was faster than anyone could achieve at any connection speed.
The ASA said: "Because we had not seen sufficient evidence to support the claim that BT's new broadband service was consistently faster than its existing 8Mb service even at peak times, we concluded that the ad was likely to mislead."
Mislead customers
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Nick Farell
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