Virgin broadband speeds found to be misleading

The Advertising Standards Authority has upheld a complaint lodged by BT against Virgin Media, over an advertisement for high download speeds.

Virgin’s ‘Hate to Wait?’ advertisement, which ran in the national media, claimed that a TV show could be downloaded in 26 minutes on its ‘M 2Mbps’ (megabits per second)’ package.

BT argued that this claim was misleading, as downloads during peak-times would be slower than advertised, due to Virgin’s usage caps.

The ASA has agreed that the advertisement did not make clear that speeds may vary, and has ordered Virgin to amend this.

Virgin Media argued that, for users of its M 2Mbps package, it would only take a few minutes longer to download a TV show during peak hours.

Virgin did admit that users would be subject to its so-called traffic management system, which caps data usage during peak hours, although this would only affect users of the 2Mbps service.

Customers on its L 4Mbps package could download 60 songs and/or two TV shows being capped, whereas those on the XL 20Mbps package could download 614 songs or nine TV shows before they reached the data cap, Virgin said.

“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,” Virgin Media said in a statement.

Furthermore, Virgin has admitted to wrongly using the term ‘megabits’ to refer to the size of files downloaded, and has agreed to change the advertisement to use the correct term ‘megabytes’.

Via: BBC News

Broadband Connection Speeds

Broadband is often referred to as ‘high-speed internet’ because of its generally high rate of data transmission, and is usually defined as having a connection speed of 256 kbit/s or higher.

There is often some discrepancy between broadband connection speeds advertised by a provider, and the actual speeds that are found in practise. This can occur when a provider ‘overbooks’ its broadband capacities,  becoming an issue when a large amount of users engage in high bandwidth activities, such as video streaming, or peer-to-peer file sharing.

Related Links:
Virgin Broadband
XLN Business Broadband
XLN Broadband Speed Checker (coming soon)

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