Complaints against fibre optic advertising from Virgin Media upheld by the ASA

The upholding of several complaints that relate to Virgin Medias national press advertising for its broadband services by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has struck another blow to the ISP.

The advertising of its 50Mbps broadband service as ‘fibre-optic’ when it is, in fact, based on a hybrid solution of fibre-coax has led to Virgin Media becoming controversial in the technical community. The claims regarding the copper local loop that ADSL broadband use and the implication from the advert that it is unable to cope has led to Virgin Media being challenged by a member of the public and Sky.

A national press advert from Virgin Media, which was quoted from ASA Adjudication read: “EVERYBODY’S TALKING ABOUT FIBRE OPTIC BROADBAND THERE’S ONLY ONE COMPANY ACTUALLY DOING IT. The way we use the internet is changing. Now that we’re watching more things like BBC iPlayer, the old-fashioned copper phone wires that other broadband companies use, are struggling to cope. But as people are beginning to realise, there is a solution – fibre optic broadband. After investing about £13 billion, only Virgin Media have fibre optic broadband that’s widely available. Prices start at only £4.50 a month, guaranteed for a year, when you take a Virgin phone line for £11 a month.”

The claims made by Virgin that the problems are being caused by the copper network has been challenged by Sky, who have pointed out that it is Virgin Media that have implemented a traffic management system that limits its customers’ use of broadband on its fibre network, whereas Sky have not needed to do this on its copper based network.

In its judgment the ASA referred to a claim that “the maximum theoretical download speed that could be achieved through a single copper phone line was 24 Mb”. The maximum theoretical speed from a copper local loop is in fact higher than this, and based on the laws of physics could exceed 100Mbps over short distances. Experts have, however, stressed that these speed are not going to become available in the immediate future, although the maximum actual speeds using the copper network will be increase by the fibre-to-the cabinet (FTTC) based service, which is similar to the fibre-coax hybrid solution from Virgin Media.

In defence of its position on the shaping of traffic Virgin Media suggested that this was only introduces to restrict the activities of a very limited number of users. The claims made that Virgin Media was unable to cope with demand and had therefore introduce traffic management was reject by the ASA who noted that the fact that both services were affected by user volumes was made clear by Virgin in its advertising.

Four other complaints that related to the way Virgin portrayed ADSL as struggling to cope under the pressure of consumer demand increasing were, however, upheld by the ASA who judged that the comparison made could not be substantiated and was not fair. A further complaint relating to claims that a national fibre network was 20 years away was also upheld, noting that this reference was for FTTH, although in conclusion it said that adverts claiming that Virgin were 4 years ahead was unlikely to mislead users because this related to FTTC, which Virgins current hybrid setup is equivalent to. The ASA also concluded that Virgin had breached the codes of advertising practice relating to truthfulness by claiming it had the “only fibre optic network widely available in the UK.”

The ASA judgment stated “We told Virgin to avoid exaggerating the impact that high bandwidth applications were having on the speed of delivery of ADSL broadband and to remove the claim ‘fibre optic broadband is already here and paid for’ in ads that referred to the extent of their network coverage. “