Who Has The Fastest Internet?: Comcast Told It Can No Longer Make That Claim

Who has the fastest internet? It’s hard to say. It’s even harder for Comcast to say, thanks to a ruling from the National Advertising Review Board (NARB) that asks the internet service provider to stop claiming it has “fastest internet.”

The recommendation provided by the NARB, a division of the advertising industry’s system of self-regulation body administered by the Council of Better Business Bureaus, comes after Verizon challenged the language Comcast has used to promote its internet service.

In advertisements, Comcast has made numerous claims boasting about how its Xfinity service outpaces other ISPs. “Xfinity from Comcast delivers America’s fastest Internet according to 60 million consumer tests run at Speedtest.net,” one ad stated. Another said, “Xfinity Internet delivers the fastest in-home Wi-Fi,” though provided no qualification to back the claim.

A third ad—the one that likely caught the eye of Verizon to spark the challenge—stated Xfinity was “faster than the competition. FiOS just can’t keep up.”

The NARB noted it wasn’t necessarily fair to draw a direct comparison between the services because the companies offer various tiers of service that achieve different speeds. It also suggested that Comcast’s claims of being the “fastest” internet service required context that the company wasn’t providing.

For example, while Speedtest.net has declared Xfinity the fastest ISP according to its overall testing, data from Ookla —the proprietor of Speedtest.net—also showed that the top 10 percent of Verizon FiOS consumers had higher upload speeds than the top 10 percent of Xfinity consumers.

Comcast has been given the go ahead to continue to tout its achievement based on Ookla’s data as long as it “avoids any statement or implication that the data demonstrates that Xfinity provides faster Internet speeds than competing ISPs."

The company’s claim to providing the “fastest in-home Wi-Fi” were also challenged, as the board found Comcast was basing that on router performance even though internet speeds are primarily determined by speed of the connection provided by the ISP and dependent on the tier of service the consumer purchases.

The panel found that Comcast “did not provide a reasonable basis for the messages reasonably conveyed by the challenged 'fastest in-home Wi-Fi' claims” and recommended Comcast discontinue using the claim in its advertisements.

Comcast disagreed with the suggestions from the NARB, but said that it would agree to comply with the decision. “Comcast will take NARB’s recommendations into account in developing future advertisements, and expects NAD and NARB will hold all advertisers to the same standards when making similar claims,” the company said.