After a recent heat up contest between Airtel and Reliance Jio which saw the latter claiming the former’s advertisement for ‘Fastest Mobile Network’ to be misleading, ASCI (Advertising Standards Council of India) has now directed Airtel to take down its advertisement as it contravenes the guidelines put up by the ASCI.
Following Fast Track Complaints Committee (FTCC) findings, ASCI now claims that the advertisement doesn’t reveal the fact that the results are from tests done in Q3-Q4 2016.
“While the advertiser submitted an Ookla certificate, they did not provide an explicit test methodology to substantiate that the method is robust to capture that sample; and is representative and comparable across operators, geographies and consumers,” says the FTCC finding.
After FTCC referred to a TRAI website portal, it found out that the density of the userbase of both the operators is significantly different from each other. Further, the committee also claims that the term ‘Officially’ is misleading in the sense as it is not backed by any government authority and tries to play around with customer’s lack of awareness.
Moreover, a different report from Techpp claims that Ookla’s Android App is not the best to measure internet speeds on dual SIM smartphones as often the app would take the speed of the SIM which is assigned calls instead of the one which is assigned for mobile data. So if you have put your primary SIM for Mobile Data and assigned it for data only, the app might still favour the other SIM for speed tests.
In response, Airtel released a statement which read – “We do not agree with ASCI’s decision and will file an appeal as per guidelines. Our campaign is based on findings by Ookla – the globally recognised leader in mobile speed tests and also a benchmark for reputed global operators. We have shared all supporting facts with ASCI and strongly believe that our campaign is compliant with all guidelines. We will be happy to provide more details, if required, and hope ASCI will reconsider its decision.” (Source: Times of India)
Further, Ookla also released its statement which read – “The award designation was validated using the IP methodology described above for all Speedtest results during the last 6 months of 2016 (Q3 & Q4). When analysing the data for all of 2016, Airtel was still the clear leader. When analysing data for 2017 to date, Airtel is still the clear leader. It is worth noting that after correcting for the Android limitation, Airtel’s lead over Jio increases for all aforementioned date ranges.” (Source: Times of India)