Virgin Media attracts more online searches about broadband outages than any of Britain’s other major providers. Research published by DTP Group puts the figure at 27,100 searches per month, accounting for 44% of all the searches it counted.
BT came second with 14,800 searches. TalkTalk and EE received 6,600 apiece, followed by Sky on 3,600 and Vodafone on 2,900. On the face of it, that leaves Virgin Media a very long way ahead of everybody else.
But these are searches, not recorded outages. One large problem could send thousands of people online at once, while the same customer might search several times for updates. The figures don’t reveal how many faults occurred, how long they lasted or how many homes were affected.
Image Credit: Virgin Media
The red and grey interior of Virgin Media’s Reading headquarters
Why Virgin Media’s 44% needs a health warning
The study also uses the raw number of searches without allowing for the size of each provider. Bigger broadband companies have more customers available to experience a problem. Ofcom avoids that problem in its complaints figures by comparing providers per 100,000 customers, and its latest results put TalkTalk – not Virgin Media – at the top for broadband complaints.
DTP Group isn’t a consumer watchdog. It sells technology and support services to businesses, including tools designed to spot problems early and keep downtime to a minimum. Publishing research about unreliable internet draws attention to precisely the sort of disruption its services are intended to reduce. That doesn’t make the figures wrong, but it does help explain the angle.
What the study can safely tell us is that Virgin Media’s name appears in far more outage-related searches than those of the five other providers included. Customer numbers, well-publicised outages and differences in how people look for help could all contribute. Without information from the networks themselves, it cannot tell us which broadband provider is genuinely the most reliable.
