US: Watchdog sides against Comcast over broadband ads

Comcast should stop bragging its broadband service as the fastest in the country, an industry watchdog reiterated in a decision unveiled on Wednesday. The National Advertising Review Board also told Comcast to stop boasting that it offers the “fastest in-home WiFi.”

The decision upheld an earlier ruling by the National Advertising Division, a unit administered by the Better Business Bureau.

The NARB’s ruling stems from Verizon’s challenge to Comcast ads that contained statements like “FiOS just can’t keep up,” “Faster than the competition,” “Fastest in-home WiFi speed,” and “XFINITY from Comcast delivers America’s fastest Internet according to 60 million consumer tests run at Speedtest.net.”

The NARB said it agreed with the earlier finding that those ads were problematic. Among other reasons, the claim that Xfinity was “America’s fastest internet” conveys that Xfinity is faster for all tiers of service, according to the NARB.

Comcast’s claims wee based on crowdsourced data from metrics company Ookla’s Speedtest.net, which said in 2015 that XFINITY offered the fastest Internet service.

But the NARB, like the NAD, found that Ookla’s methodology didn’t support Comcast’s boasts. “The Ookla data is not a good fit for an overall claim that an ISP delivers ‘America’s fastest internet’” the NARB wrote.

The watchdog added that Ookla’s data comes from people who took the free test on Speedtest.net — a group that wasn’t necessarily a representative sample.

Full Content: Consumerist

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