occurred on the satellite platforms as the cable versions were encoded by the provider themselves and so remained at 17 Mbit/s while the later launched terrestrial version was statistically multiplexed between 3 Mbit/s and 17 Mbit/s. Further anger ensued that the new satellite bitrate fell below the recommendations set out by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), of which the BBC is a member. These recommend a minimum of 12 Mbit/s, but as Andy Quested, principal technologist at the BBC stated, the current technology gave a consistent reliable output of 8-10 Mbit/s which would soon become the requirements with improved technology. Within four months of the change, by mid December, the number of complaints on this issue to the BBC reached 130 of which one was passed straight to the BBC Trust. At around the same time a petition was added to the official Number10 website in December 2009, petitioning then Prime Minister Gordon Brown to bring the BBC into line with the EBU standards. The petition was sparked by the BBC's insistence that there was no problem with the bit rate. In addition, tests run by consumer publication Which?, published in December 2009, found no significant decline in picture quality on the BBC HD channel, labelling the difference in picture quality between the new and old BBC HD broadcasts as "insignificant". Meanwhile, the international version of BBC HD continued to broadcast on satellite at the higher bitrate and screen resolution. The following year, on 30 April 2010, a delegation of viewers who had complained met with Andy Quested and Danielle Nagler to argue that BBC HD was failing to "deliver a very high quality technical service to viewers, by adhering to, or seeking to exceed, industry standards for picture resolution". The visitors took part in an evaluation of the new and old encoder's picture quality (by an ITU R500 test) and the results demonstrated that the new encoder, at much reduced bit rate, was not only "as good as" but actually much better than the old. The issue was resolved when, on 3 June 2010, the BBC introduced variable bitrate encoding and fixed previous problems with mixing, fading and noise in pictures. The variable bitrate encoding allowed the channel to maintain the same average bandwidth while allowing an increase in bitrate for more demanding programme scenes such as fast movement. Equally the fixes for mixing and fading treated specific problems