According to Virgin Media O2, 98% of Brits rely on the internet on a daily basis. That’s why it can be so annoying when your home broadband Wi-Fi connection encounters issues and ruins that important work Zoom call or your nightly Netflix sessions.

To help combat unwanted Wi-Fi woe, Virgin Media has announced a new ‘smart support service’ that monitors its customers broadband connections in the background. It claims to be able to identify issues and resolve some without ever having to contact the customer.

The clever tech works by remotely monitoring your home Virgin Wi-Fi Hub to continuously keep an eye on connection quality, then flagging any possible problems such as speed dips and disconnections.

The Wi-Fi Hub itself is able to try and fix the problem overnight using clever machine learning technology – but if that doesn’t work, the smart support can escalate the issue and Virgin can send you personalised information on how to get things working again.

As a last port of call, an engineer can be called to your home free of charge.

Virgin said that from today its smart support scheme will initially target 300,000 of its customers before the free service rolls out to all customers “in the future”, according to a press release that also said company research found that 34% of UK broadband users wouldn’t feel confident fixing Wi-Fi issues.

“Virgin Media has long been recognised for ultrafast speeds, but we also know that reliability is equally important which is why we’re rolling out a new, innovative smart support service that will proactively act as a helping hand to fix network niggles and optimise the performance of our connectivity – often with customers not needing to do a thing,” said Gareth Lister, Director of Connectivity at Virgin Media O2.

“Smart support will evolve over time, reducing hassle for our customers and further improving connectivity for those that need it to offer a best-in-class service for all.”

The smart support service is based on tech giant Cisco’s ThousandEyes monitoring technology that uses cloud-based data sets to monitor wireless network performance. Virgin said smart support will come first to Fibre customers, with those signed up to its more advanced Full Fibre plans being brought into the scheme at a later time.

Virgin Media merged with mobile provider O2 in 2021 to create Virgin Media O2. The firm offers perks to customers who have a Virgin broadband package and O2 mobile plan, such as a Wi-Fi guarantee at no extra cost that promises minimum download speeds of 30Mbps in every room of your house or £100 credit.

This guarantee is normally charged at £8 per month, but Virgin argues it offers a faster minimum speed promise than rivals BT, Sky, EE, and Vodafone.