From the Brighton Evening Argus.
Internet users have criticised their broadband supplier - and say they are
not getting a good enough service.
A number of Virgin Media customers living in the BN2 postcode area of
Brighton have contacted The Argus to complain that their connection slows
dramatically during peak times.
They say they have been experiencing the problems for months, but that
Virgin has only made efforts to fix it in the past few days.
While some customers have said their connection is back to the 20MB speed
they pay for, others say nothing has changed.
Nick Brackenbury, of St Martin's Place, Brighton, said: "This problem began
in November.
That's months of paying for a service that is poor during the off-peak
times, and totally unusable during the busy 4pm-11pm on-peak period."
Another Virgin Media customer living in Ewhurst Road, who asked not to be
named, agreed that the problem started in November.
He said: "I did not make a formal complaint at this stage because I was
still able to view web pages. However, streaming videos was almost
impossible.
"Then in January, my broadband became even worse and I was unable to use my
internet connection from 6pm to 11pm every day.
"I am a theoretical chemist and my work requires me to connect to my work
computer to observe calculations etc. This is, obviously, only possible with
a strong internet connection."
Answers IT support worker Stuart Chapman, who lives in Islingword Road, also
in BN2, said he had difficulty doing his job from home for three months.
Although Virgin Media's recent work seems to have fixed the problem, he
criticised the company for not acting quicker, failing to inform customers
of the exact problem and not having adequate customer support.
Mr Chapman said: "We were not given any kind of straight answers. You get
through to a support centre and they are very polite but absolutely useless.
"At first they said it was because I was using a Mac rather than a PC but I
knew that wasn't the case."
Mr Chapman said he was only eventually contacted by UKbased technical
support staff after he started complaining about Virgin Media on social
networking site Twitter.
A spokeswoman for Virgin Media said she was aware that problems were being
caused in the BN2 area because of peak time demand.
But she added: "Work to conduct the necessary upgrades is already
progressing at the highest priority and incremental improvements should be
seen in the coming weeks.
"We are sorry that the individuals you have spoken to feel their technical
queries have not been addressed by our fault support centre and we will be
investigating this further.
"Many calls are dealt with in the UK, a proportion are answered via our
offshore call centres, but all our advisers, no matter where they're based,
are highly trained and skilled in dealing with technical enquiries."
http://www.theargus.co.uk/news/busin..._Media/?ref=eb
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