Communications giant Virgin Media has slated rival Internet Service Provider BSkyB over its claims in relation to unlimited broadband.

One of the nation’s leading broadband providers and communications giant Virgin Media has slated its rival provider BSkyB after the rival firm claimed that it was not the only Internet Service Provider in the UK to offer truly unlimited broadband to its consumers. These claims have been made by officials from BSkyB after it dropped its fair usage policy recently, thus removing any restrictions from its unlimited broadband package.

As BSkyB readies itself for an aggressive marketing campaign that will see it reiterate its claims to be the only truly unlimited broadband service through various media channels, Virgin has become the first major rival to hit back in response to these claims – something that industry officials are expecting to happen more over the coming weeks, as a rising number of other ISPs make their views known.

One official from Virgin Media said: “Virgin Media has always believed that customers should be able to enjoy their broadband as much as they want. We were the first ISP to provide unlimited broadband packages to our entire customer base, including both cable and ADSL, and have never imposed any form of ‘fair use’ policy.”

Another industry official also commented about Sky’s claims, stating: “Obviously we welcome any removal of small print, but there is still one ‘get out of jail card’ among all the public relations rhetoric. Sky still says that any excessive behaviour – and they give the example of someone using his account to send spam mail – could lead to them being suspended from the network. So there is still something in place to protect the network. I think all the ISPs are playing semantics here with the ‘unlimited’ claims. I don’t feel that Sky are offering anything more than the likes of Be or O2 have been offering for a while now.”