Internet users want faster broadband speeds for homeworking

Rise in customers seeking to switch to a more reliable provider in lockdown after outages disrupt services

INCREASING numbers of internet users are attempting to change to faster providers due to outages caused while people are working from home during the lockdown. Uswitch, the broadband comparison site, said it had registered a 10 per cent rise in people searching for faster suppliers since the restrictions came in.

The development comes as more than 40,000 Virgin customers were hit by an outage this week, leaving people struggling to hold work meetings online.

Yesterday, a government adviser urged ministers to consider increasing the £5 billion announced in the Budget to upgrade rural broadband and look to improve the overall network, so as to make working from home more attractive to people after the pandemic.

Rory Stoves, a spokesman for Uswitch, said the company usually saw a 50-50 split between searches for cheap and fast broadband deals, but that searches had become weighted 40 per cent to 60 per cent in favour of speed during the lockdown.

He added: “The most interesting change in trend we’ve seen is the bias towards faster products, with customers looking to upgrade their broadband to cater for the increase in home usage. This is something which I understand is mirrored across the whole industry.”

Earlier this month, Uswitch research revealed that the UK ranked just 34th out of 207 countries for downspeeds, behind Singapore and Luxembourg.

The findings come as users suffered the most serious outage of the lockdown on Monday when Virgin’s services went down, leaving around 43,000 people without internet at its peak. During the outage customers vented their frustration at having to use slower 4G on their phones.

The company, which has around 5.3 million customers, said the failure was not to do with increased lockdown usage but a technical fault.

A spokesman for the company said: “The problem was fixed in the early hours of Tuesday. We believe the issue to have been caused by a technical fault within our core network.”

Andrew Glover, chair of the Internet Service Providers Association, said recent outages were not due to high demand, but ‘intermittent broadband issues”. He added: “Despite a significant increase in broadband usage, UK networks have proved to be resilient and continue to provide vital support for the public and businesses.”

Chris Stark, the Government’s adviser on climate change, said ministers should look to invest more in broadband infrastructure to encourage people to keep working from home.

“I definitely feel they should put more emphasis on that priority and if that means spending more money then that seems like a good conclusion,” Mr Stark told the Telegraph.