“Misleading” Virgin Media broadband ad banned

A national advertising campaign launched by Virgin Media has been banned after BT lodged a complaint with the Advertising Standards Authority.

Virgin Media’s “Hate to Wait?” advert featured a table comparing download times of music tracks and TV shows when using Virgin Media’s various broadband packages. The company has made much of its superior download speeds for broadband in comparison to its rivals. BT complained to the ASA that advertised broadband speeds were misleading, since Virgin’s traffic management policy imposed a cap on download speeds at peak times.

Virgin Media admitted to implementing its traffic management policy during peak hours but insisted TV shows downloaded during this time period would take only a few minutes longer to download. Moreover, it “only focused on the heaviest downloaders and uploaders” on its network. Restrictions were put in place between 4 and 9pm and only affected customers who “downloaded an abnormal amount of data”.

The ASA said that only a small proportion of Virgin Media customers had been limited by its traffic management policy. However, customers on Virgin Media’s ‘M’ package could not download even one TV programme in peak time without download limits being imposed, whilst the Size: L package customers could download just two TV shows or 60 songs. The ASA has ruled that Virgin Media must mention the slower download times in its advertising. It also said that the number of downloads that triggered the traffic management policy could not be deemed “unreasonable usage” and therefore judged the advert to be misleading.

Virgin Media insisted that it never intended its advertising to be deceptive. “We believe our Hate to Wait campaign provided a simple and transparent comparison between broadband speeds for consumers looking to choose between Virgin Media’s M, L and XL broadband packages,” the company said in a statement.

Virgin Media also conceded it had incorrectly used the term “megabits” to quantify download times, and has agreed to change this to the correct term of “megabytes”. So, just to clarify: Mb = Megabits and MB = MegaBytes, and one MB = 8 Mb.

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