Uk News - Virgin Media Cited For Misleading Claims

[GhostShip]

Someone is not happy with Virgins Speed claims, and the regulator agrees.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7483675.stm

A complaint lodged by BT about the speeds of Virgin Media's broadband service has been upheld by the Advertising Standards Authority.
BT argued that Virgin's usage caps meant that downloads during peak times would be slower than advertised.
The ASA has agreed and ordered Virgin to make it clear that speeds will vary.
In its adjudication it said that the advert did not make it clear that customers on Virgin Media's lower speed packages would only be able to download TV shows at the speeds advertised during off-peak hours.
It ruled that Virgin Media needed to clarify that download times would be restricted during peak hours.

Virgin Media argued that, for users of its M 2Mbps (megabits per second) package, a TV show downloaded during peak hours would only take a few minutes longer to download.
But it did admit that users would be subject to its so-called traffic management system, which caps data usage during peak hours.

On a secondary issue, Virgin admitted that it wrongly used the term "megabits" when referring to the size of the files being downloaded and agreed to change it to the correct "megabytes" term.

The "online" market is a very competitive one in the UK and  folks like myself have looked with a cynical eye at big advertisement campaigns followed by the fast introduction of throtling once folks had signed up for a year or two contract, however given that BT control much of the existing infrastructure in a way Bell does in Canada we must be cautious of making too much use of the big stick when it comes to complaints against rival operators. 

[Lagerlout666]

pot calling the kettle black springs to mind, i left BT last year for the same thing, throttling and poor speeds. I moved to bethere.co.uk the best move i ever made. DSL as it is suppose to be.