With the way T-Mobile does its ads and new product announcements, it’s not really a surprise that its competitors will actually complain. We can imagine how many times the National Advertising Division, a telecom industry watchdog group, has reviewed such complaints and also the claims itself of the carrier. The latest complaint is from Verizon, who objected to being called older and slower and also to T-Mobile’s claims that they have the fastest LTE network in the country.
The T-Mobile ad campaign not only claimed that it was newer, faster, and unlimited and that its competitor, Verizon specifically, was limiting its subscribers because they were older and slower and didn’t offer the same unlimited service. After the campaign was released, Verizon started offering their unlimited plans and probably consequently, T-Mobile stopped their ads after that. They however still continued to claim they were newer and faster.
The self-regulating NAD reviewer the complaint from Verizon that the data T-Mobile was using was crowd-sourced data from Ookla and OpenSignal. They claimed that the data was skewed in favor of the uncarrier since the data gathered was one month after Verizon reintroduced their unlimited plans. Their explanation as to why that is biased is a little skewed, but nonetheless, the NAD advised T-Mobile to stop claiming it was faster and newer.
The NAD said that T-Mobile “agrees to comply” with their recommendations, but the carrier is now saying the new data they’re using verify their earlier claims. And while the NAD can come up with recommendations, they cannot force said companies to comply. They have also given instructions for T-Mobile to modify their claim of 99.7% of Verizon customers coverage, clarifying it’s by population and not geographic area.
VIA: ASRC
