Virgin Media hammered by ASA

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 1 Aug 2007 at 10:08

Virgin Media has become the latest in an ever-growing list of ISPs to be rebuked by the Advertising Standards Authority.

Complaints were upheld on six different counts against the cable provider, which drew misleading comparisons between its service and Sky's.

The cable provider was ticked off for comparing its 2Mb/sec service with Sky's more expensive 8Mb/sec service, completely ignoring the fact that Sky also offered the cheaper 2Mb/sec service. "Virgin said it had been unaware of the 2Mb/sec offering from Sky," the ASA assessment claims, even though the service has been heavily promoted. "The comparison was unfair and likely to mislead," the ASA ruled.

Virgin was also pulled up for advertising its £30 promotional price instead of the £39 standard price, and for failing to make clear its video-on-demand service incurred extra charges.

The cable company was further reprimanded for claiming that Sky had no video-on-demand services and implying there was no warranty on its equipment.

Finally, Virgin was brought to heel for not making it clear enough that connection speeds hinged on the number of people connected at any one time. "We understood that Virgin's broadband speed was not dependent on distance, unlike Sky's DSL network, but also understood that Virgin's cable network became slower the more customers used the service at the same time, because of sharing bandwidth on the same node before the local cable joined the main fibre optic network," the ASA assessment reads.

Virgin has been told not to run the adverts again.