COMMUNICATIONS giant BT has come under fire for its customer service after parts of a village and surrounding area were left without a broadband connection for a week.

Certain homes and businesses in Orford, near Woodbridge, could not access the internet or send or receive emails for around seven days.

Liz Ferretti, from nearby Gedgrave, is a freelance writer and missed a deadline for sending her magazine to publishers. “The connection has never been great and it’s still not perfect,” she said. “The first time I spent a good hour and a half on the phone with BT trying to find out what was going on. A few days later when nothing improved I phoned again and they hadn’t even logged that I had a technical fault. That’s what has been so annoying. It took them days to acknowledge there was a serious issue. They kept suggesting it was my router even though I said other homes were also having problems and it was unlikely all routers had gone wrong at the same time.

“You would think if they were receiving a lot of calls from the Orford area informing them of difficulties there would be a way for them to flag it up so they could identify a wider problem.”

The broadband connection was lost on Wednesday, February 13 and not restored until the following Tuesday.

Philip Reed, a freelance writer and editor, works largely from his home in Orford but had to travel to his office in London to access emails.

“I only joined BT broadband three weeks ago so when I contacted them on the Wednesday and suggested it was the router I thought it was perfectly plausible,” he said. “We were asked to wait 24 hours but nothing improved so we called them again and they sent out a new router. However, for whatever reason, that didn’t arrive until the Monday. Things were still no better and it took them until the next day to admit it was a wider problem. Sine then I’ve heard nothing - not even an apology.

“What annoys a lot of us is that we are paying the same as the rest of the country - as you would in Ipswich and London - yet we are receiving an inferior service.”

Suffolk Coastal MP Therese Coffey is now taking up the matter and pursuing it with BT.

A spokesman for the company said: “When we investigate faults such as this our agents follow the processes for solving these issues. On these cases the problems were not being shown as being connected to any major outages so the next thing that is carried out is to change the router.

“We would of course like to apologise if anyone felt that they did not get good service from us during this period.”