The ASA's Upheld Advertising Complaints vs Virgin Media

BT challenged whether the claim "Ofcom have proven our fibre optic broadband is around twice as fast as BT" and similar in all the ads was misleading and could be substantiated because:

1. they understood the comparison failed to take BT Infinity, a broadband service that offered speeds of up to 40 Mbit/s, into account;

3. the ads failed to state clearly which services were being compared; and

4. they believed Ofcom's findings were misrepresented in that Ofcom had not compared Virgin Media's cable service with that of BT as implied.

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7. Three members of the public challenged whether the claim "Fibre optic broadband from Virgin Media. The fastest in the UK" in ad (e) was misleading and could be substantiated because other providers offered a faster download speed than Virgin Media."

9. BT challenged whether the claim "Virgin Media is up to twice as fast for ... shopping, tweeting ... " because they believed those activities depended on web browsing speed and DNS resolution as well as download speed and that they were also affected by factors such as the performance of the connecting server and the amount of traffic accessing a website.

10. BT challenged whether the claim "Virgin Media is up to twice as fast for ... gaming" was misleading and could be substantiated because they believed it suggested internet connection speed was the only factor in achieving optimum game performance. They believed that other factors such as latency and jitter as well as factors not influenced by the internet service provider (ISP) also had an impact.