BBC Watchdog TV Show Slaps Virgin Media for Slow Broadband Speeds

The BBC’s popular consumer affairs TV show, Watchdog, will tonight (8pm BBC One) take aim at cable operator Virgin Media for “over promising and under delivering on fibre broadband speeds,” with tests highlighted by the show claiming that some people receive just 3% of the speed they were sold.

Watchdog says that Virgin Media routinely promotes broadband download speeds of up to 200Mbps (this is old information as they now offer up to 300Mbps), although they state that “customers across the country are claiming that they are unable to perform activities which should be straightforward with speeds of around 200Mbps.”

Apparently “a number of customers” have told the show that when they complain to the cable operator they are told their low speeds are down to “over-utilization issues,” which the show says means that the company has signed up too many customers for broadband in particular areas, and the increased demand leads to a decline in speeds (network congestion).

Watchdog wanted to see how Virgin Media was selling packages in affected areas and so they posed as new customers. The programme claims to have found that time and time again they were sold speeds of around 200Mbps – with most conceding that “there would be only a marginal decline at peak times“. But when Watchdog tested the exact speeds at these addresses, they found that customers were at times receiving as little as 3% of the speeds promised by the operator’s staff.

Tom Mockridge, Virgin Media CEO, said:

“I, along with everybody at Virgin Media, am disappointed that, in these cases, we fell short of the high standards we set for ourselves and which our customers rightly expect of us.

We apologise for the inconvenience to these customers and have resolved the issues they raised. All of our sales agents have been re-briefed on the Company’s sales policy and we are providing additional training to ensure everyone complies with it.

Virgin Media invests more than £1 billion a year in its ultrafast network. This year we are also investing £200 million to upgrade network capacity where it’s needed to meet the growing demand for faster broadband speeds across the UK.

If you are a Virgin Media customer, please take a look at virginmedia.com for guidance on what you can do to improve the performance of your broadband and ensure that it isn’t something in your home slowing it down. If you need the support of one of our expert customer agents, please contact the Virgin Media team on 0800 952 2222.”

Sadly issues with “over-utilization” are nothing new and tend to be location specific. On top of that we also know that speed problems can be caused when Virgin Media assigns an incorrect power level to individual properties on their HFC DOCSIS cable network, which may impact performance until engineers are able to resolve it (problems with power levels can be caused by various factors, such as a network fault).

The scathing criticism is likely to be particularly damaging to the cable operator, which has long made a point out of highlighting the stability of their broadband speeds, particularly in comparison to the connections provided on Openreach’s (BT) typically slower ADSL and FTTC / VDSL2 based networks.

However, for the necessary pursuit of balance, Virgin Media still tend to do well in speedtest studies and those appear to show that any problems with poor performance are likely to affect a small group of users (“small” on a big operator is of course a relative term). The majority should still be able to receive close to the advertised rate, although the operator’s own testing with modified SamKnows routers suggests that peak time congestion can impact some of their packages (here).

Of course if you happen to be one of those who suffers from poor performance like this then being told that you’re in a small group of users doesn’t make the pain any less noticeable. Similarly Virgin Media’s inability to warn new customers in areas that are confirmed to suffer from such problems is another big worry.

In the meantime Tom told the Watchdog team that in the small number of areas where such problems occur then they will not sell products that cannot be delivered.