WightFibre are getting serious about upping their game on the Isle of Wight.
They’ve come to OnTheWight to help them, as they really want to get their message out there that WightFibre is an Island-based organisation, employing local people and that it’s changed since the Wight Cable days that ended over a year ago, marked by the company name change.
We’ve worked with them to construct a series of features taking Islanders through the transformation of the organisation and detailing all of the ways they can make your broadband life easier.
Not like the old Wight Cable
There’s no doubting, Wight Cable had gained a less-than-perfect reputation on the Isle of Wight, but moves to change that started as soon as John Irvine joined the company as Managing Director.
John is a straight-talking long-term veteran of the Telecoms industry. All of that experience has given him a clear vision of where he wants WightFibre to be.
Alongside the other changes detailed below, one of John’s recent actions was to bring in (much-needed) investment into the company. This came from Keith Young who has been involved with the commercial growth of the Internet since its very beginnings in the UK, as he was a founding shareholder of EasyNet, one of the UK’s first ISPs.
With such a strong pedigree, it’s clear that an investor like Keith wouldn’t put his money into something that he didn’t think was doing it right.
More swift installs
Chatting to John, he admits to OnTheWight that, in the past, installing new WightFibre customers wasn’t all it should’ve been, with installation delays being longer than he’d wanted.
As is his way, John has tackled this head-on. WightFibre has now signed a contract with fellow-Island business, Studio Phase.
This has led to WightFibre installations, from order to pulling down up to 100Mb/s on your new broadband connection, now taking less than a week, considerably faster than BT, he tells us.
Quick fixes on issues
WightFibre’s engineers live and work on the Island, leading to any unexpected problems being resolved far more quickly that if off-Island engineers were used.
By way of example, around last Christmas, a car skidded on the ice, straight into one of WightFibre’s road-side cabinets obliterating it and cutting off the broadband and telephone connections for all of those local houses.
Understanding Christmas was a time that demanded access to broadband and phone calls, WightFibre had a local company replace the whole cabinet and rewire it, bringing their broadband back up a mere day and a half later, with all of their phones connected within another 36 hours.
John tells us that BT would usually take 10-15 days to fix such a problem.
Island-based telephone support that cares
When we were chatting about the dedicated support that that WightFibre employs on the Island, we were stunned to hear that WightFibre customers have such high regard for them.
There’s often a bunch of flowers on the support desk having been sent in by a delighted customer. We all know that these days people are quick enough to complain, but to send a ‘Thank You’ such as that, they must have had an amazing service.
What’s next?
The next planned sponsored feature will detail the advantages that a faster broadband connection brings to houses where more than one person is accessing the Internet at the same time.
Contact details
You can reach WightFibre on 01983 240 240.
Our thanks to the WightFibre for sponsoring this feature. Please support them, as they and other businesses taking paid promotion enables you to continue reading OnTheWight for free.
Image: john-spade under a CC BY 2.0 license
