Virgin Media has had its’ knuckles wrapped by the Advertising Standard Agency about the company’s unlimited broadband adverts.
The ASA received several complaints, including complaints from the public, BskyB and BT, who teamed up against Virgin to get the complaint upheld. Their complaint was that customers could not in fact have unlimited access to films, music and television content because of a traffic management policy implemented by Virgin Media that limits customer’s broadband speed by half if they use too much bandwidth.
Broadband providers are permitted to say that their services are unlimited even if the slow down user speeds as long as it is clearly stated in the company’s advertising, if it isn’t it can be construed as misleading.
A Virgin Media spokesman said: ‘Our customers receive unlimited, superfast broadband and, even if they’re one of the tiny minority traffic managed for a short period of time, Virgin Media customers can download more than other ‘unlimited’ services, including BT Infinity.
‘Unlike BT or Sky, all Virgin Media customers can download as much as they like, safe in the knowledge we’ll never charge them more.’
Recent broadband packages by BT are truly unlimited, with the adverts actually saying that they will never slow customer speeds down. This may mean that they require more capacity but in the long run, people may opt for the service just for peace of mind that they can watch/stream what they want at any time and the speeds that they are paying for.
Hopefully this will see a trend of internet providers hiding behind the unlimited usage but throttled tactics that can see customers experiencing unusable broadband services during peak times.