VIRGINIA BEACH, Va. (WAVY) — People living in some Virginia Beach communities are demanding better internet service in their neighborhoods.
A petition aimed at Cox Communications is getting some renewed attention following a recent outage in the Ocean Lakes neighborhood last week.
Customers said the internet service is unpredictable at times, leaving them in a bind.
10 On Your Side spoke with Tyler Foley, the man who started the petition.
He and other customers who live in Ocean Lakes and nearby communities are hoping to send a message to Cox Communications.
They also want to share their concerns with city leaders but in the meantime, we’re told customers are filing complaints with the Federal Communications Commission.
After a network upgrade caused an unexpected service disruption in Ocean Lakes, a Cox Communications spokeswoman told 10 On Your Side the company has adjusted its procedures to prevent it from happening again.
However, Foley isn’t holding his breath.
“We deal with intermittent connectivity issues. Sometimes they can last for days at a time, and many times if you check the Cox site it said there’s no issue reported,” he said.
Foley first started the online petition back in August to get the company’s attention. He lives in nearby Hunt Club Community and said the most recent outage in Ocean Lakes didn’t come as a surprise.
“I’ve had to take days off because I can’t connect,” Foley said. “There’s times where we will be in the middle of homeschooling, it will go out for two or three hours.”
Foley also started a group on Nextdoor to track the service interruptions. According to posts online, the issues affect customers in multiple communities. We spoke to Cox customer and Ocean Lakes resident Tim Walker on Friday.
“It happens way too often. I can tell you off the top of my head right now, within the past month, I’ve experienced six outages,” Walker said.
We asked Cox how many Ocean Lakes customers were affected during the network upgrade last week. We also asked how many outages Ocean Lakes and other nearby communities have experienced over the last few months.
Despite repeated requests, we didn’t get an answer.
In a statement, the company did say it understands the importance of the internet, especially now.
We appreciate everyone’s patience as we worked to identify and resolve the issue impacting internet service in Ocean Lakes late last week. It appears that our planned network upgrade resulted in an unexpected service disruption for some customers. We recognize how important the internet is to our customers, especially now. As a result, we’ve proactively credited those customers that were in the specific neighborhoods impacted. The credit will appear on their next bill. Additionally, we’ve adjusted our planned network upgrade procedures to prevent this from happening again.
It’s always our goal to provide the most reliable experience possible for our customers. The upgrade Ocean Lakes residents received is just one part of a larger project to prepare our network for the demands of the future. With this upgrade, customers will have an even better streaming, gaming and sharing experience.
“There’s so many things that we rely on the internet for and having poor service is unacceptable at this point,” Foley said.