BSkyB ( Sky Broadband ) and BT have today succeeded in forcing a campaign website (www.stopthebroadbandcon.org), which had been run by their arch rival Virgin Media UK, off the internet. The outcome follows a legal complaint by Sky's lawyers (Osborne Clarke) to the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) in March of this year (here).

Sky accused the website, which called upon rival broadband ISPs to "stop advertising speeds that not a single customer can receive" (e.g. "up to" 24Mbps), of denigrating other internet providers (ISPs) by suggesting they dealt with their customers dishonestly.

On top of that Sky firmly believed that most ADSL providers were committed to explaining to consumers the speed their line could support. BT also challenged whether the claim "Ofcom found Virgin Media broadband is twice as fast as other providers" in ad (a) was misleading, because it did not take their superfast BT-Infinity service into account.

In total BT and Sky made 8 primary challenges to the site and its content (text and video), every single one of which was today upheld by the ASA. As a result Virgin Media's stopthebroadbandcon.org website has now vanished and is instead redirecting to a page about typical broadband speeds on Virgin's own site.


Meanwhile the ASA is currently conducting an entirely separate consultation to tackle the question of how broadband ISP speeds should be advertised. Included in that are a number of proposals to help clarify or possibly even ban the use of "up to" under certain situations (here).

Sadly the ASA's conclusion is far too long for an effective summary, but you can read it in its entirety here.

UPDATE 12:54pm

It didn't take BT long to react and welcome the ASA's ruling on Virgin Media’s "misleading" Stop the Broadband Con campaign. BT claims that the ASA, "confirmed what was obvious to Virgin customers; when Virgin launched the campaign via social media, Twitter was littered with complaints from Virgin’s own customers suggesting it sorts out its own speeds before criticising others." A fair point, perhaps.


BT concluded by saying that "customers are clearly voting with their feet by not signing up for Virgin's broadband," which appears to be incorrect as Virgin Media's broadband customer base continued to grow from 4,287,000 to 4,332,600 (+45,600) during Q1-2011 (Virgin's last set of financial results).

Meanwhile a Virgin Media spokesperson has informed all who care to ask that "Advertising 'up to' broadband speeds you can't deliver is a con". It also criticised Sky and BT for hampering "a legitimate effort to give consumers a voice in the debate", although in fairness its site did sometimes go a bit too far and occasionally came off more as a crafty self promotional tool.