ISPA rejects calls to strip Bulldog of award

Online petition

Bulldog will not be stripped of its "Best Consumer Broadband ISP 2004" title, regardless of how many people sign an online petition complaining about the provider.

So far, more than 260 have signed a petition calling for Bulldog to lose its award, after complaining that the ISP's broadband service is poor and customer service fails to respond to enquiries.

Message boards at ADSLGuide are littered with comments from customers who say their broadband service isn't up to scratch, with one writing that his 2Mb service is running slower that a standard 512k connection.

Others say they've waited for ages to speak to someone at tech support - only to be cut off before getting through.

The petition calls on ISPA to "remove Bulldog's Status as consumer broadband providor of the year, as we believe it is misleading. In particular the following points: a)Bulldog DSl is not responding to emails sent to customer service and technical support. b) not updating their internet status page in a timely manner. c) making it difficult to report faults due to high call waiting queues."

However, a spokesman for ISPA - the UK's internet trade body behind that award - said it has no plans to strip Bulldog of its title, as it was based on past performances. Instead, he said, unhappy customers should contact ISPA to complain. In fact, a number of people have already done so and ISPA is due to meet Bulldog this week to discuss the issue.

Bulldog continues to apologise for the "ongoing problems with the Bulldog service" and urges customers to be patient.

In its latest statement the ISP said: "Bulldog confirms that essential scheduled work on the Bulldog network is continuing. Bulldog is aware that this work may cause some service issues for a small number of users, and would like to apologise for any ongoing problems with the Bulldog service.

"The work is part of Bulldog's ongoing campaign to introduce greater capacity on its network to ensure a fast and reliable service for all users in the long term, and is part of a scheduled engineering program.

"Bulldog would like to thank its users for their patience while this restructuring is carried out. Bulldog would also like to state that the problems experienced by some users in contacting technical support are currently being resolved, with a further doubling of capacity at the support call centre." ®

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