Virgin Media has blamed the poor performance of its ADSL broadband (Virgin.net) platform on network congestion, an issue that has been present to varying different degrees for some time now.

The comment was made in response to yesterdays Samknows ISP performance report (here), which noted Virgin.net's poor overall performance in comparison to the groups otherwise reasonably strong cable broadband service:


Regular readers and Virgin.net customers alike will no doubt be all too familiar with the problems and may recall them peaking for several months towards the end of last year (news), when many customers were hit by speed, connectivity and poor customer support issues.

However, for the most part, those issues were blamed on questionable technical/router problems and not congestion due to high demand. More interestingly, Virgin's most recent first quarter results for 2008 showed that its Virgin.net platform actually lost customers, going from 287,300 at the end of 2007 to 279,500.

It is of course possible that the recent advertising push could have allowed Virgin.net to increase its customer numbers beyond those original losses. The latest results are due towards the end of this week and we’ll be keeping an eye out for that "growing demand". Comment source: techradar .