Truth, Lies and Broadband: rivals fail to ban Virgin ad

Twenty complaints were received about a Virgin radio ad, a print ad and an outdoor poster ad, including some from competitors Sky and Carphone Warehouse-owned Talk Talk.

There were 10 alleged breaches of the ASA's Code governing what is acceptable in adverts, and Virgin was cleared on all 10 counts.

Talk Talk complained that a press ad labelled ADSL suppliers liars, that it was denigratory. Sky said that the adverts misleadingly claimed that broadband speeds would never be affected in Virgin services.

The controversial advertising campaign was titled 'Truth, Lies and Broadband' and was designed to highlight the advantages of Virgin's cable broadband network, which was built by NTL, over the telephone-based ADSL networks of its competitors.

It is widely accepted that phone-based network capabilities deteriorate with distance from a telephone exchange but that their coverage is near total, whereas less ubiquitous cable networks do not deteriorate with distance but are susceptible to deterioration through network overcrowding.

A major point of the advertising campaign was that Virgin's systems used its fibre-optic cable network rather than the twisted copper pairs of telephone lines, and that this gave it superior performance.

The majority of the objections made to the adverts were to Virgin's claims that its network "doesn't use copper wire". Complaints focused on the co-axial cable used by Virgin between people's homes and the main body of the network. Parts of that cable are made from copper, they said.

The ASA found that while copper was a component of those cables, the wires did not suffer the same technical limits as telephone cables, which was the thrust of Virgin's argument.

"We acknowledged that Virgin's co-axial cables were made of either aluminium or steel and had a copper coating," said the ASA judgment. "However, we understood the copper element of the co-axial cable had a different structure, and served a different function, to the twisted pairs of copper wires used in a standard ADSL connection."

"We considered that most consumers would understand the term 'copper wire', in the context of these ads, to refer to the copper wires of an ADSL connection … we concluded that the claims 'doesn't use copper wire' in the radio ad, and 'delivered via a fibre optic cable' in the press ad, were unlikely to mislead."

Sky and Talk Talk complained that Virgin's advertising implied that their ADSL services covered just half of the country when in fact it covered 98% of homes. The ASA ruled that this was a misreading of the advert.

The advert had said that cable broadband was available to 50% of the country, and that the other half could get ADSL broadband.

"TalkTalk and Sky objected that the claim...implied that both Sky and TalkTalk had a UK ADSL coverage of around 50%, when they believed about 98% of the country could get an ADSL broadband connection," said the ASA's summary of the complaints.

"We considered that the emphasis of the ad was that Virgin's cable broadband service was currently available to half of the country, and that those not covered by cable broadband would be able to get an ADSL connection instead," it said.

Sky said that the advert's claims that network speed was not affected by distance from the phone exchange was misleading because it implied that speed was never affected on the network.

The ASA disagreed, saying that it understood that overcrowding could affect cable networks but that distance did not, and that Virgin was simply comparing the two kinds of networks in a way that made its look better.

"Because we considered that Virgin cable broadband was being compared with that specific aspect of an ADSL connection, and because Virgin cable broadband was not susceptible to the same kind of speed depreciation as an ADSL connection, we concluded that on this point the ad was unlikely to mislead," it said.

All 10 points made by the complaints were dismissed by the ASA and the adverts cleared.