Tiscali has successfully fought off complaints that it was not able to supply the broadband speeds advertised in a national magazine campaign. 

The complaints were levelled at the internet service provider by members of the public from Middlesex and West Lothian who had subscribed to its broadband services.

Tiscali's ad offered 'up to 1Mbps' and 'up to 2Mbps' packages and the complainants challenged whether this was misleading, because they believed that Tiscali could not provide the full rates of those services.

The ISP maintained that its residential broadband is a contended service where customers share the 1Mbps and 2Mbps bandwidths.

The speeds are dictated by the number of customers online at any given time, which was why the company advertised the speeds as 'up to'.

"Tiscali asserted that all their customers were capable of achieving the advertised 1Mbps and 2Mbps speeds and that customers should experience speeds within the ranges stated by BT Wholesale," said the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) ruling. 

"These are 200-1000Kbps for 1Mbps customers and 400-2000Kbps for 2Mbps customers. Tiscali said that it did not monitor customer download speeds because they did not believe it was practical or common industry practice."

The ISP explained that it only investigated when a customer reported a slow speed.
The advert was investigated for substantiation, honesty, truthfulness and availability of products but the ASA did not find Tiscali in breach of any of these elements.

The ASA noted that the contended service would lead to customers experiencing different speeds depending on a number of factors, but considered this to be common knowledge among average broadband customers.