Virgin rapped over 20 Mbps claims

The ASA (Advertising Standards Authority) has rebuked Virgin Media over a national press ad that claimed its fibre optic broadband could deliver speeds of 20 Mbps to 10 out of 10 homes.

The claim was contested by BSkyB, which said it did not believe there was sufficient capacity in Virgin’s network to provide all customers with 20 Mbps at the same time.

Virgin argued the advertisement was intended to highlight that all fibre optic broadband customers could achieve the headline speed they had subscribed to, saying this was not possible on ADSL networks, because of the ‘postcode lottery’ nature of ADSL technology. The cabler told the ASA its source for the data was the analyst Point Topic.

The ASA upheld the complaint, noting that customers were likely to take the 20 Mbps level as the actual speeds achieved by cable broadband users. It concluded that because it had not seen data demonstrating that all Virgin’s 20 Mbps customers could achieve the headline speed in the home, Virgin had not substantiated that claim.