The UK Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) has upheld a complaint by BT against a national press advert for Virgin Media's broadband service. The advert used downloads of music and video files to highlight the performance differences between their internal packages.

However, BT complained that the ad was misleading because they believed that Virgin's Traffic Management Policy capped customers' speeds during peak hours. During those hours customers might not be able to download songs or TV shows at the speeds and times cited in the ad:


Unfortunately, at the time this complaint was being made, customers on Virgin's up to 2Mbps M package had a peak-time usage cap of 300MB (0.3GB). The 341MB (note: advert also incorrectly stated Mb [Megabits] for file size instead of MegaBytes) video file example would have broken this, thus resulting in slower than promoted performance.

The ASA has understandably upheld BT's complaint and called on Virgin Media to make its traffic management policy clearer in future adverts:


Virgin Media has since introduced a newer traffic management policy, which can be read HERE. The ASA's full adjudication is viewable HERE. Ofcom recently introduced a new broadband speed 'Code of Practice' (here), which is designed to encourage UK ISPs to be more honest about their advertised speeds. It will be interesting to see whether this has any real impact over the coming months.

In related news, last month saw the 'Reader's Digest Trusted Brands 2008' survey award Virgin Media its 'Most Trusted Brand' status for their UK ISP division.