BT is running ads in Bristol dissing Virgin Media’s fibre offerings and Virgin is having none of it.

The BT poster campaign says ‘Bristol. Don’t settle for Virgin’, inferring its own fibre broadband offerings are superior (or at least more reliable). Pretty tame stuff, we thought, but it seems to have seriously triggered Virgin, which immediately mobilized its west-country operation to plan a counterattack.

It took the form of a large van driving around Bristol, with the following slogan emblazoned on the side: ‘B******T Our fastest average speed in Bristol is 516Mbps. That’s loads faster than BT. Enough said.’ Pretty edgy stuff, we think you’ll agree. The smallprint says BT can only manage a pedestrian 300 Mbps in Bristol. The asterisked-out initial statement seems to be deliberately ambiguous, inferring ‘bullshit’ but also the hashtag #bornfast. See what they did there?

“BT’s broadband bunkum just couldn’t go unchecked,” said Cilesta Van Doorn, Brand and Marketing Director at Virgin Media. “Residents of Bristol won’t be fooled by BT’s babble and we look forward to welcoming anyone who wants to experience life in the fast lane with our superior ultrafast speeds. With a reliable future-proof network that is bringing gigabit speeds to Bristol and more of the UK, Virgin Media is, as always, leading the charge – catch us if you can.”

Fighting words from Van Doorn there, who followed through with a press release about the whole unpleasantness, but we would have been more impressed if VM had gone all-in and actually written ‘bullshit’ on the van. Alternatively, if asterisks are mandatory, how about writing something like ‘BT are a bunch of lying b*stards and we’re not standing for any of their f*cking b*llocks anymore.’ That would have been cool, as would any attempt to exploit the cockney rhyming slang potential of Bristol.