PlusNet Community Website

I was on the Firefox Addons site just now. I clicked on the search box in the header and it expanded to twice its length. “Neat!” I thought to myself and then i realised I had forgotten what I wanted to search for!

The expanding search box is intended to increase usability but it surprised me and in the end made my task more difficult. So is it good or bad?

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And we’re all working around, or some other unimaginative second line.

James: Tues-Fri: 9-6
Liam: Mon-Fri: 9-6
Bob: Mon-Fri: 9-6
Chris: Mon and Tues, 7-4, Weds and Thurs, 2-11 & Sun 7-4
Dave: Mon-Thurs & Sun: Random split late shift

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Now, obviously, we have to make sure performance is spot on! So we just had to play with the brand new PS3 on launch day

Mmmm…. one big, heavy, monster!

Monitoring the race…!

Monitoring those traffic flows…

So they decided not to redesign the controller after-all?

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Check this out!

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… reaches No 10. Well, almost!

“We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Insist that OFCOM and the ASA stop Broadband Providers advertising ‘unlimited’ services that are in fact limited in the small print or by un-defined fair use policies.“

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/Unlimited-ADSL/

More on this at Think Broadband.

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James: Monday, Thursday and Friday (9-6)

Dave: Monday to Thursday & Sunday (1.30-7 & 9-12)

Liam: Monday to Friday (9-6)

Bob: Tuesday to Friday (9-6)

Chris: Tuesday and Wednesday (7-4) Thursday and Friday (2-11)

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We have a customer beta platform! Check out these two new URLs:

http://community.beta.plus.net

http://openid.beta.plus.net

At the moment they both display the same thing, but soon we shall be set them up to demonstrate new applications, chunks of code etc that we want to get public feedback on.

Yes, this does mean that we are about to look at playing with OpenID.

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James: Monday-Friday: 9-6

Bob: All week skive in Portugal
Dave: Monday to Wednesday (split, 1.30-7 & 9-12) & Saturday & Sunday: 12-9 (on call all week)
Liam: Monday to Friday: 9-6

Mand: Tuesday to Friday (8-5)

Chris: Weds and Thurs (7-4), Fri and Sat (2-11)

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People may have seen the threads regarding this in the Portal’s and on PUG recently.

We have started the build of this internally, and today we started looking at Skinning the various applications that are being tied together to look like the prototype (here).

We hope to be able to show off some screenshots of the skinned applications by the end of the week, once we have ironed out some minor creases. At this point, we then intend to invite our colleagues from around the business to sign up and have a play with it, and most importantly, try to break it before we let it loose on the customer base.

We’re still aiming for 04/04/07 for a Beta launch.

What this has taught us (or me)

No two applications appear to share a common theming system. Drupal uses one type of skinning engine, SMF uses a different one, Wordpress uses a different one and a poll tool we looked at uses another one.

It would be so much more useful if every system used the same sort of skinning system, e.g Smarty because that would speed up the creation of the templates by our Design Team.

Thankfully, the integration of the systems has gone well in the main, but there’s still more to be done.

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Today we activated the third segment of our latest BT Central pipe (THN-AG1).

Since activating the first two segments of this pipe, performance for interactive protocols on all of our products, and general performance experienced by Broadband Plus customers has improved significantly. This can be seen by the reduction of gold traffic drops from our network monitoring graphs:

http://www.plus.net/support/network_performance/broadband_packets_drop.shtml

We have also now fully resolved the session availability problems which had been apparent on our network.

By providing this additional capacity now, we are focusing on the experience for Broadband Premier customers. We expect improvements to non interactive traffic (such as P2P and USENET) as a result. We believe that our network is now performing at the expected level for all customers, and is operating in “normal operation” as opposed to “high demand operation”, as laid out here:

http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/network/load.shtml .

When we announced the additional capacity being assigned to our Broadband Plus customers, we stated that we would be taking a smaller profit margin across the product until the reduction of BTs IPStream pricing, which is expected in May 2007. We are now assigning additional capacity to our Broadband Premier customers and on the same basis will be taking a lower profit margin from the Premier product.

We will continue to monitor our network performance closely and appreciate feedback from customers via our online discussion forums or the PlusNet Usergroup website.

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