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Virgin and T-Mobile fall foul of ASA
Wednesday 15th October 2008, by Daniel King
Virgin Media and T-Mobile have both had complaints against them upheld by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA).
The body found that T-Mobile's claims about its mobile broadband packages could be misleading to consumers.
T-Mobile claimed in a leaflet: "Broadband on the go for £15 a month ... All the benefits of home broadband, on the move. No wires, no waiting, no worries"
It was ruled by the ASA that this could confuse people into thinking that there were no differences between the two types of service.
However, it was not made clear that land-line broadband services can achieve significantly higher speeds and generally have higher download limits than mobile packages.
Meanwhile, Virgin has had four complaints against them upheld by the ASA. The first three were about the firm's claim that it had the fasted broadband through its fibre optic cables.
Two posters and a national press ad featured the claim, which was found to be inaccurate by the ASA.
This is because the statement is based on the findings of Epitiro, which only examined 90 per cent of the total number of ISPs in the country.
ASA ruled that the campaign by Virgin implied that the information was based on industry-wide data.
Among those not covered by the study by Epitiro was Sky, a firm which is not a member of Epitiro.
The final complaint against Virgin was over the implication that subscribers to the "up to 20Mbps" service could regularly achieve that speed.
This is despite the fact that a recent study found that the average speed achieved was around half of the maximum speed achievable.
Categories: Virgin Media
