Virgin Media’s campaign against ADSL-delivered broadband has fallen foul of the Advertising Standards Authority after a complaint from rival BT. The national press ad headlined “Hate to Wait” featured a table explaining how long it would take to download a song at various speeds on Virgin’s broadband network.
In its complaint, BT said the ad was misleading because it believed Virgin’s traffic management policy placed a cap on customers’ speeds during peak hours. In response Virgin said the traffic management system only focused on the heaviest downloaders and uploaders and that customers would be asked about their usage at the point of sale so they could be sold a package that best suited their needs.
The cablenet went onto explain that a 20 Mbp/s customer would have a much higher threashold than those on a 2 Mbp/s package. Download times for customers on the L (up to 4Mbp/s) and XL packages (up to 20 Mbp/s) would not be restricted by downloading one TV show and that customers on the high end XL package could download 614 songs or nine TV shows during peak time before reaching their threshold. The figures quoted in the ad were said to be accurate when all components in the process were working at optimum capacity.
The advertisement also quoted file sizes in Megabytes rather than Megabits.
Virgin has offered to amend the advertisement to explain it would take longer than the stated 26 minutes to download the show at peak times.
However, the ASA thought that the purpose of the advertisement was to highlight speeds across all three levels and with just one peaktime TV download taking a M customer through the threshold and two on the L package the ASA concluded the advertisement was misleading.
“It would not be unreasonable for readers to expect to be able to download at least one half-hour TV show on the M package, or several half-hour TV shows on the L package, during the five hours of the peak time period without breaching Virgin’s traffic management system and having their speed capped,” said the ASA’s judgement.
Virgin has been told to make clear in future ads that download times would be subject to restrictions.
