The terms ‘totally unlimited’, implies absolutely unlimited stated a ruling that allowed the broadband provider Sky to mention this in their advertisements.

As per the verdict of the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA), the fact that the Internet Service provider Sky was utilizing the terms ‘totally unlimited downloads’ did not seem to violate any norms by marketing standards. This ruling came after the competitor Internet Service Provider Virgin Media put forward a grievance regarding Sky’s broadband ads.

Sky cited a verdict passed the previous year, when the ASA had declared that one of the advertisements of T-Mobile was confusing as it said they offered truly unrestricted service in spite of the fact that P2P file sharing, tethering and VoIP had been prohibited.

The ISP was of the opinion that their terms of ‘totally unlimited’ meant the same to what the ASA summarised as ‘truly unlimited’ because the provider had not enforced any restrictions on the consumers.

Nevertheless Virgin’s argument was that there was in fact a limit; that of speed of the service. The ADSL services offered by Sky had only standard download speeds of 7.5Mbits per second permitting 77GB of information everyday, whereas Virgins 10Mbits per second facility would allow 87GB of data to be downloaded for the same time frame even if traffic management was imposed. Sky argued that speed had no relevance to the meaning of ‘unlimited. According to reports Sky also added that there were no grievances from the users regarding their claim that said ‘totally unlimited broadband’ in spite of the advertisement being utilised for the past four years. The report therefore stated that this only went to show that a normal user knew what Sky was trying to imply in their ad and were not deceived by it.

The ASA accepted the argument and has permitted Sky to continue with their advertisement.