BT's broadband protest falls on deaf ears

 

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By Barry Collins

Posted on 8 Jul 2009 at 10:18

The ASA has turned down a cheeky complaint from BT, after the company asked the advertising watchdog to censure Virgin Media's claim to have the fastest broadband in Britain.

Press adverts for Virgin's 50Mbits/sec cable service describe it as "the UK's fastest broadband."

BT objected to this claim, because it has customers on a pilot project in Ebbsfleet, Kent, who are receiving 100Mbit/sec fibre-to-the-premises connections.

Virgin understandably objected to BT's complaint, claiming that there were only 38 homes connected to BT's FTTP service - and not all of those were occupied at the start of 2009. BT was unable to confirm how many homes were receiving the 100Mbits/sec service at the time of publication.

The ASA took a rather dim view of BT's complaint. "The ASA understood that Virgin's 50Mbits/sec broadband was currently available to over 5 million homes throughout the UK and that it would be available to the rest of homes covered by Virgin's fibre optic network by summer 2009," the adjudication reads.

"We noted that BT's 100Mbits/sec broadband was a pilot project and was neither widely available nor available to consumers outside the pilot project."

Nice try, BT.