Wrexham’s Broadband Issues Raised With Communications Firms

Broadband issues in Wrexham have been raised in face-to-face meetings with two different companies in one day by the town’s MP.

Wrexham MP Ian Lucas met with both Virgin Media and BT in Parliament earlier this week to discuss issues that residents and business had raised with him about broadband services in the town.

Mr Lucas’ meeting with Virgin Media was to catch up on the latest developments on the company’s plans to bring their fibre broadband to the town.

The plans – which came about after Mr Lucas challenged Virgin Media’s chief executive to bring the scheme to Wrexham during a Parliamentary committee – will see 24,000 Wrexham properties linked up to superfast broadband.

Mr Lucas said: “I know there has been a great deal of interest in the proposals in Wrexham and so I wanted to catch up with Virgin Media to see where we are. They told me that they are hoping to start the physical work to link Wrexham up before Christmas, and that they hope to have things complete around nine months or so later.

“They will be working towards Wrexham from the Chester direction, and have promised to keep me updated. They were very grateful for the help they have received from Wrexham council officers – I know that the officers I contacted to get the project set up did all they could to help.”

As well as meeting with Virgin Media, Mr Lucas also spoke with BT Chairman Sir Michael Rake, and raised a number of concerns people had put to him about broadband connections.

He said: “A local business recently came to me with concerns about the speed of their internet connection – but, despite being located very close to a BT exchange, and despite my raising the subject directly with BT complaints handlers, they were told that they could not be connected to the services they needed for technical reasons.

“That is simply not good enough and, sadly, it is not an isolated case. I told Sir Michael this and he accepted that there were issues which BT do need to look at with its broadband service provision.”