As usual our ISP Complaints page has been given its weekly update and once again UK ISP Virgin.net has continued to hold the majority of anger with seventeen new complaints.

While ADSL users await next weeks promised capacity upgrade, this weeks complaints have been largely focused toward the services dialup difficulties. One reader’s complaint (Rob) sums things up nicely:

Changed over from Virgin PAYG to 24/7 3 days ago, not been able to connect since. Contacted customer service (takes at least 5 mins to get through). First time told me to delete and re-load my dial-up settings, this didn't work and cost me £4 (at 50p per min). Second time told to do the same again, no luck and £3.50 cost.

Third time (about 5 mins after my previous call) A very helpful person told me Virgin are having problems with their 24/7 server (told me he'd had lots of calls with the same problem), he gave me the number of the back-up server (PAYG) and this connected immediately proving that the problem was not with my PC. This call cost me another £2.50.

My question is why couldn't the first two customer service persons tell me there was a problem and save me all the hassle and money?

The ISP had been blaming these issues on a computer virus infecting users systems, although very few people believed such a feeble excuse, especially those that were well protected.

Clearly customer support is now aware of the unmetered dialup issues, so one must ask, why hasn’t it updated its service status page to reflect the problems?