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Virgin Media to pull national ad due to misleading speed claims

The Advertising Standards Authority has instructed Virgin Media to pull a national advert as it found speed claims to be misleading.

The advert had the headline “ONLY 3 OUT OF 10 HOMES IN THE UK CAN GET 8Mb OR MORE OVER BT PHONE LINES. 10 OUT OF 10 HOMES WITH OUR FIBRE OPTIC BROADBAND CAN GET 20Mb”.   This claim was challenged by BSkyB (Sky).  The ASA also challenged a comparison of speeds on Virgin Media’s service and speeds over BT phone lines in further text in the advert.

Virgin Media responded by saying that it’s fibre-optic cable network did have the ability to provide access line speeds of 20Mbps, with footnotes on the actual throughput speed.

However the ASA was having none of it, stating that customers would assume that they would actually get 20Mbps speeds at home, rather than know that it referred to the potential speeds available.  They thought the footnote text actually contradicted rather than qualified the claim of 20Mbps speeds. 

The ASA noted a previous adjudication that showed that Virgin Media 20Mbps cable customers achieved actual speeds at around half or just over the headline rate, and finally concluded that the basis for the comparison between fibre optic broadband and ADSL (BT line) broadband was not appropriate.

Although there are less limiting factors on cable broadband compared to ADSL broadband, speeds are still are still subject to capacity available on the network and the number of users online.