When elephants mud wrestle.
Comcast’s advertising claims that it “delivers America’s fastest Internet” and “the fastest, most reliable in-home WiFi” aren’t supported and should be pulled. That’s the finding of the advertising industry’s self-regulation board, called the National Advertising Division (NAD). Responding to a complaint filed by Verizon, which naturally would prefer you think it has the fastest Internet service, NAD said Comcast used dubious data to back up its pitch…
As support for its claims that XFINITY delivers America’s “fastest Internet,” Comcast relied on crowdsourced data from Ookla’s “Speedtest” application. Ookla’s “Speedtest” is an application which consumers download on their mobile devices and can run to measure their current upload and download speeds. Ookla’s “fastest Internet in America” award is based on a different methodology than previous NAD cases involving superior speed claims, but is also intended to show the “top-end performance of a given ISP.”
However, NAD noted in its decision, instead of relying on an aggregation of crowdsourced data on download and upload speeds, Ookla based its award on the top 10 percent of each ISP’s Speedtest download results.
NAD determined that Ookla’s methodology wasn’t a good fit for the purposes of substantiating Comcast’s overall superior speed performance claim that “XFINITY delivers the fastest Internet in America.” NAD recommended the claim be discontinued.
The WiFi claim was skating on even thinner ice – it was based on an in-house comparison of Comcast’s and Verizon’s home routers.
NAD also dinged Comcast for saying “Verizon is eliminating its traditional home phone service in certain markets” and that “Verizon is discontinuing its copper wire-based home phone service”. It called the statements “potentially confusing” and recommended Comcast change it to avoid giving the impression that Verizon was eliminating phone service completely.
Comcast’s response was to disagree and say it would appeal the finding.