Bulldog - voted the "Best Consumer Broadband ISP" at this year's UK internet awards - has apologised to customers once again, after "a few hundred" were left without Net access yesterday.

Bulldog is engaged in a "quest to get more capacity on our network", according to a spokesman. Unfortunately for some users, this has meant their service going down, with little help or support from the ISP.

Another told us: "Seems hundreds of customers of Bulldog across the country have been without service since the small hours of [yesterday] morning. Predictably, getting through to customer services and technical support is a joke.

"For me personally, this is the second serious outage in the space of a month. I have written to the Bulldog chief executive to complain; at this time I have not yet received a reply."

In a statement, the ISP, which is now owned by Cable & Wireless, said: "Bulldog would like to apologise to customers affected by service issues yesterday. "Problems were encountered on several BT DataStream exchanges used by Bulldog to provide broadband services. This affected a few hundred end users. Part of the issue was a consequence of recent significant capacity additions to the network. 

"This was unfortunately compounded by an IPstream failure in BT's network at Ilford which affected other Bulldog users and hence caused heavy loading of the support lines.

"The Bulldog technical support team worked closely with BT to resolve the problems and return customers to normal service. Customers should now be experiencing improved network performance enabled by the recent enhancements."

Anyhow, users probably need to brace themselves for further disruption as Bulldog works on the "long term sustainability of its network".

A week ago as many as one in ten of Bulldog's punters suffered technical problems, as Bulldog bungled the migration of customers onto a new server. ®

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