Virgin rebuked for trashing ADSL broadband

 

Gallery

By Barry Collins

Posted on 4 Feb 2009 at 14:16

Virgin Media has once again fallen foul of the advertising watchdog for over-exaggerating the parlous state of British broadband.

The cable company has had no fewer than nine different complaints upheld against it in five separate adjudications since the beginning of 2007.

Today's adjudication adds another four to that tally, after the company launched a series of attack ads against ADSL providers.

One press ad claimed that "now that we're watching more things like BBC iPlayer, the old-fashioned copper phones wires that other broadband companies use are struggling to cope".

The ad also featured a Metro newspaper clipping claiming that "a national fibre network is at least 20 years away".

Virgin went on to claim that it was the "only residential fibre optic cable broadband provider with a national reach."

The Advertising Standards Authority wasn't impressed with Virgin's assessment of the broadband landscape.

The ASA said that while ADSL broadband was "being put under strain" by video applications, copper wires were not "struggling to cope". Virgin had "exaggerated the extent of the effect on user experience at the time the ads appeared."

Virgin's claims of a nationwide fibre network being a couple of decades away were also dismissed, with BT's fibre-to-the-cabinet (FTTC) rollout scheduled to reach 10 million homes by 2012. "We noted Virgin's cable broadband was delivered FTTC and therefore concluded that [the ads] could mislead," the ASA ruled.

Neither is Virgin the nationwide player it makes out, the ASA ruled, because it's network only covers 50% of the UK population. "This was unlikely to meet with consumers' expectations of what they understood by the term 'widely available'," the watchdog proclaimed.

Virgin has been told not to run the ads again and to avoid "exaggerating the impact that high bandwidth applications were having on the speed of delivery of ADSL broadband" in the future.