Verizon told to stop lying about its 5G offering

Ever keen not to be out done by rival AT&T, Verizon has manged to get told off for making misleading claims through its 5G marketing.

AT&T famously pushed its luck by rebranding its 4G service as 5G, for which it was universally ridiculed. The US advertising authorities eventually got around to telling AT&T to pack it in over a year later and then languidly turned their attention elsewhere. Specifically the National Advertising Division was prompted by an AT&T complaint a look at a couple of Verizon 5G TV ads.

“People from midtown Manhattan to downtown Denver can experience what your 5G can deliver,” claimed one of the ads, while depicting people performing astronomical speed tests all over the country. NAD found that this made false implications about both the general availability of its 5G service, and in the specific locations featured, and told Verizon to stop lying, which it promised to do.

It has, however, only been a couple of months since Verizon last played fast and loose with the truth, resulting in an almost identical reprimand. There don’t seem to be any actual punishments dealt out for this duplicity, so we wouldn’t be surprised to hear about a Verizon ad claiming its 5G makes you stronger, smarter and more attractive before long.

The full extent of Verizon’s dishonesty on this matter was exposed by recent Opensignal numbers, which revealed that Verizon 5G is available to just 0.5% of its subscribers. This is because Verizon has decided to focus on high frequency spectrum, which has very short range. It’s therefore correct to prevent Verizon from trying to have its cake and eat it by inferring anything other than very limited availability of its 5G service.

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