Background
Summary of Council decision:
Two issues were investigated, one of which was Upheld. The other was informally
resolved after the advertiser had amended their advertising.
Ad description
A direct mailing to a residential address and a circular for The One Broadband:
a. The direct mailing, seen on 9 July 2025, sent to a London address had a heading which stated, “IT’S TIME TO GET CONNECTED TO FULL FIBRE”. Further text stated, “Dear Resident, Your household has been identified as having poor broadband connectivity. This is often caused by a reliance on the old copper network and having outdated WiFi routers. The One fixes this. By connecting to The One, you will benefit from 100% fibre broadband and a state of the art WiFi 6 router. The result? 70x faster speeds and 5x better reliability. All from just £28 per month”.
The mailing also showed images on the right-hand side, each featuring a dial, with the heading “Your current connection. 30 Mbps. Speed taken from ThinkBroadband data” around the top dial and the second dial headed “The One connection” and the text “up to 2200 Mbps. Speed based on The Everything One plan” underneath.
b. The circular seen on 18 June 2025 at a Norwich address contained the same text and imagery as ad (a) except text in the body of the mailing it stated that the “poor broadband connectivity […] is often caused by a poor broadband connection and having outdated WiFi routers” and the final line in the text stated, “All from just £29 per month”.
Issue
Two complainants, who were both already using Fibre to the premises (FTTP) broadband and had no issues with their current broadband connectivity, challenged whether the claims in ads (a) and (b) regarding there being poor connectivity at the household, and improvements in speed and reliability by switching to The One Broadband were misleading.
Response
DSV Communications Ltd t/a The One Broadband said that ad (a) had been sent to residents in London where FTTP had been available for some time, but where their data suggested there had been low take-up of the service.
They said ad (b) had been sent to an area of Norwich where FTTP had only recently been installed and that they had therefore expected that none of the households who received ad (b) would already be signed up to FTTP. They told us their data was provided by ThinkBroadband, an independent data aggregator for broadband speeds.
The One Broadband therefore understood that the majority of households who received the ads were very likely to be facing poor broadband connectivity, because they were still using copper broadband and not accessing faster FTTP, but acknowledged that for some recipients the content of the ads would be irrelevant because they may have already changed their broadband provision to FTTP or full fibre. They believed that consumers who had already connected to FTTP would therefore understand that the claims in the ads did not reflect their current service provision and would have understood that the ads were not intended for them and would have disregarded them as would be the case for other advertising received through the door that was not relevant to them.
They also stated that information within the ads, for example, in the second paragraph of ad (a) text stated, “This (poor connectivity) is often caused by a reliance on the old copper networking having outdated WiFi routers, and in ad (b) “[…] is often caused by a poor broadband connection”, would be seen by recipients of the ads, who were well-aware that they had switched to FTTP and were no longer reliant on an older network, would therefore understand that the ads were not relevant to them.
They also pointed out that the third paragraph of the letter clearly reinforced the fact that they were proposing fibre broadband as the solution to their historically slow speeds where it stated, “By connecting to The One, you will benefit from 100% fibre broadband …”. They believed that was sufficient to enable any recipient to identify whether or not the ads were relevant for them.
They said that the specific speed and reliability claims in the ads were based on their own fastest available connected speed of 2200 Mbps on full fibre compared to the average previous broadband speed of 30Mbps on the copper network. Their claim that their provision would be 5x more reliable was sourced from Ofcom in their Connected Nations report that compared fibre broadband reliability with that of copper broadband.
Assessment
Upheld
The ASA acknowledged that households using older technologies such as copper, cable or part-fibre networks would, in general, benefit from performance improvements such as higher speeds and better reliability by changing to full fibre technology.
We understood that ad (a) included an address and was distributed in an area where take up of FTTP had been low, and that ad (b) was unaddressed, and distributed in an area where FTTP was in the process of being newly laid. We also understood that both ads had not been targeted only to households who were still using older technologies and were therefore experiencing lower broadband performance such as lower speeds and reliability.
Both ads were addressed to “Dear Resident” and included claims such as “your current connection 30Mbps”, “your household has been identified as having poor broadband connectivity” and “caused by a poor broadband connection” which we considered would be understood by consumers in both geographical areas to be objective claims that would apply in relation to their own household and their own particular broadband service provision. We also considered that they would understand the claims “The One fixes this. By connecting to The One, you will benefit from 100% fibre broadband and a state of the art WiFi 6 router. The result? 70x faster speeds and 5x better reliability” to mean that by switching to The One, any connectivity issues with their broadband would be solved and their broadband would be 70 times faster and five times more reliable.
We acknowledged that the ads emphasised connecting to full fibre and ad (a) stated that poor connectivity was “often by a reliance on the old copper network and having outdated WiFi routers” but we considered that this was not sufficient to override the impression that each ad had been sent to a particular household that had been identified as having a poor broadband connection that would be fixed by switching to The One. We noted that ad (b) did not contain the same reference to “the old copper network”.
Although households who were still using older technologies would benefit from performance improvements such as higher speeds and better reliability by changing to full fibre, because the ads had also been targeted to households who were already using full fibre broadband, and were not therefore experiencing the poor broadband connection and speeds of 30mbps stated in the ads, we concluded the claims in ads (a) and (b) which suggested consumers at specific location and household addresses were experiencing poor broadband connectivity were misleading.
The ads breached CAP Code (Edition 12) rule 3.1 and (Misleading Advertising).
Action
The ads must not appear in the form complained of again. We told DSV Communications t/a The One Broadband to ensure that when targeting a neighbourhood to promote full-fibre services their future advertising did not misleadingly suggest consumers at a specific household or address had been identified as having poor broadband connectivity or speeds when that was not the case.
