PlusNet Community Website

Slapvid - Does peer-to-peer video streaming in the browser. It’s just a proof of concept now and it doesn’t bring anything useful to users but it could bring great bandwidth savings to content providers. (Unfortunate name though, is happy slapping just a UK thing?)

Chime.tv - A Joost-like interface to YouTube, Veoh, Google Vids and others that runs in the browser.

OSX vs Vista development methods - The design teams of OSX and Longhorn discuss the design process. Did you know that Apple did NO user testing for OSX? It was nearly all designed by Steve Jobs!

Pioneering a User Experience (UX) Process - Some great tips on integrating user centred design into your company.

Web Application Form Design - A short discussion of the pros and cons of various aspects of form design.

Wikipedia game - And one for after-hours…

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Amidst concerns of power loss to our main site, we are now unveiling IH3. Although it does have a similar postcode to IH2. Whilst it does not carry the additional features of our other two sites, its ability to relocate is second to none.

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A lot of the country has been subject to an awful lot of rain in the past few days. Sheffield and Rotherham have been particularly badly hit as can be seen on the the BBC, the PlusNet Community Site and the Sheffield Forum.

This post from Carol goes into some of the detail of how we’ve been coping at PlusNet.

Events like this will mean that we put our “High demand” and “Disaster situation” broadband platform configurations on standby. Under normal operations the rate limits in place would be as per the following pages, BBYW, Premier and Broadband Plus.

At times of lower than expect network load we will increase some of the rate limits to maximise network usage but at times of significantly higher than normal usage we may need to take further action as per this page.

In particular we have been looking at the effect the weather has on VPN and HTTP traffic. During the winter snow we saw significant increases in VPN traffic as people decided to work from home rather than brave the weather. We needed to ensure close monitoring of the traffic in case there were similar patterns and if so consider switching to high demand operation.

Our high demand configuration would mean reducing the rate limits on P2P and Usenet traffic, and possibly FTP and HTTP downloads, the exact amount would be determined by how much the overall traffic increased. The aim being to ensure that the interactive traffic that people were using still work as it should. We can also fine-tune the high demand configuration dependent on customer feedback. We would anticipate that a weekday during the daytime that customers would want VPN, browsing, VoIP and email in particular prioritised under high demand at the expense of P2P and binary Usenet. Whereas in an evening gaming may take the place of VPN. Do people agree on this? If something has to be restricted in order to cope with the increased demand what would you choose and in what order?

The disaster situation configuration on the other hand would normally only need to be brought in should there be a significant loss of central pipe capacity. In this case in order to ensure a fair share of the available bandwidth we may need to temporarily block certain traffic like P2P and binary Usenet and introduce a per user rate limit on other traffic.

Whilst we are ready at any time to activate the high demand or disaster situation configurations if needed we hope that they aren’t necessary but want to ensure that any change over is a painless as possible by preparing for the conditions at hand and removed as soon as it is no longer required.

And in case anyone is wondered who is monitoring, well it’s the Comms Cat of course ☺

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A couple of new articles posted today:

This morning we launched “The Great PlusNet Summer Giveaway” and “The 90 Day Satisfaction Guarantee”. Check them out on The Portal front page and read more about the details on the comms team blog article.

Our commentary on the floods affecting South Yorkshire continue with more discussion in the forums, complete with a post from one of our employees whose house is flooded and details of what is happening with the threats of power outages.

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Today we are under the threat of “rolling power outages”. Check ceelectricuk.com for more details on them.
Basically, because not everything is working 100% on the power grid, they are moving the power around to allow for investigation, clean ups and fixes. As a result, we may lose power at any point. (edit: I’ve just been told that we should expect one between 12 and 3pm. edit 2: Now NOT happening!).
We’ve got network engineers and sysadmins out at all our Sheffield sites, checking things over and doing test fail overs on the hardware. In principle, the service should be fine but of course it’s better to be safer than sorry. We actually had a power failure in S1 last night which was looked after by our UPS kit. Part of this testing it is to make sure the UPS kit is still in good working order after that fail over. Just to make something clear, we do this sort of testing regularly, but when you know there is a high risk, it would be dumb not to test them again!

Our internal forums are extremely busy, being filled with comments and “all clears” from the engineers as they investigate and check kit. It’s quite dramatic in a way. This is a copy of one of the threads we’ve generated from the meetings:

backup generators have 8 hours of fuel and plan for resupply if necessary.
fieldhouse way is still dry and has good power supply.
Action plan in place on calls and tickets
call being made now to liberata.
homeworkers working tickets
S/S on the way out re tickets
also link in SS re dam and what we will then need to do.
need a plan for nightshift
confirmed IH1 is still dry.
temp call centre at IH ready
Carl N executing DR plan for phone redirection
Sarah executing DR plan for symposium IVR.
contacted teleworker situation
Will security stay here: yes.
4pm next call.

If we do lose power in S1, it’s likely to be for about 3 hours. This means I’ll be heading home to keep working from there (provided my house has power. It was turned off again at 7:30 this morning). If so, I’ll update this post again.

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There is a possibility that we may lose service to the Community Site for a period during a power outage. The site is still in beta testing and as such does not have the same resiliency as our other services.

This is down to the possibility of a power outage due to the recent floods.

You can see our most recent service status on this here:-

http://usertools.plus.net/status/archive/1182940603.htm

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Over the last couple of months we’ve been looking hard at our referrals model. We want our Referrers to gain more value by recommending our services and as a result of this, we have made two considerable changes to both our referral offers and a replacement for our 30 day trial.

The Great PlusNet Summer Giveaway

Recommend a friend or colleague to sign up to PlusNet and we’ll give you upto £25 if they stay for 3 months or more. Click here for more details!

The 90 Day Satisfaction Guarantee

At PlusNet, we’re so confident that you’ll love the services that we offer, we’ll give you 3 months to try them. If you switch to us and you don’t like the service for any reason and decide to cancel, we’ll refund your subscription fees! More details are available on our website.

Here’s what we said to the press:

“We’ve introduced this simple satisfaction guarantee because we’re proud and confident about our broadband service in comparison with other products on the market,” said Neil Armstrong, Products Director at PlusNet. “We already offer a one-month guarantee which makes PlusNet a confident choice for anyone who isn’t currently happy with their current provider. We know customers stay with PlusNet because they are happy, not because they are tied into long contracts”.

Feel free to come and discuss these new developments in our Community Site.

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On Monday the 25th of June 2007, Sheffield was badly hit by flooding as ‘a sixth of the annual rainfall’ fell ‘in just 12 hours’ over the Yorkshire region.

PlusNet is still up and running but we are a few heads down as people have been unable to get into the centre of Sheffield, especially coming in from the east of the country. As a consequence it is likely that our phone response times will be below normal, but we’ve got lots of people using VPN to work remotely and help process tickets. Therefore, if your query can be raised via the tickets system please do so, rather than phoning in.

We’ve started a thread in our forums to share photos and horror stories about last night. Please go and contribute here: http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php?topic=196.msg1294#msg1294

Also, Carol has posted about how it affected us last night in the CSC blog here: http://community.plus.net/csc/2007/06/25/its-raining-its-pouring/

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Today Sheffield saw the worse rainfall that it has experienced in years. The issue with Sheffield is, like Rome, it is built on seven hills and has the associated rivers and valleys running through it.

Our building is based in the City Centre just slightly up one of the hills, which is located at the meeting of all the main rivers in Sheffield. This means that when the rivers get dangerously high, the building is ok, but the ability for our staff to get to and from work is severely disrupted.

When the early shift came into work at 7am, no one had any idea of what was to come, it was raining but there was no indication that floods were on the way. Come 3pm we had some staff who lived locally with flooding at their homes, they went home and took action where they could and returned to work to service you, our customers.

Around 4pm the roads around the building became gridlocked with some cars not moving for up to one hour. Flooding at the bottom of our road created a round robin effect with the cars outside our office. Staff who were due to finish shift at 4pm, left and within 1 hour were back, they had made no progress and came back into work to sit it out! They stayed and continued to work tickets to help with the increase in volumes we were seeing to the support centre.

We had one guy needing to get home to York but was still at the office at 9pm this evening. 

At 6pm things still weren’t any better and we had plenty staying in work to wait for things to clear, the TVs were giving us information on the problems throughout the city and especially in Rotherham. We also found some key websites which would help us all understand the issues out there and review our travels home based on this information.

At 7pm we sent out for pizza and side orders to feed the troops and build up the energy levels as some of our analyst had been working for 12 hours+ They had been away from home for longer than this so thanks to the ones working at the hut who stayed on to get our pizzas ready.

At 8pm the roads had cleared some, but the rain kept on coming down. I left and headed home on a 3 mile detour from a normal 4 mile trip, as it was all up hill and up the valleys I managed this in just under 30 mins. Luke  one of the TSMs following on to be sure of a clear route home if possible, in a Plusnet convoy, you could call it contingency planning, or was it safety in numbers.

At 9pm it was identified that some staff were struggling to get in for nightshift, myself and Simon TSM on shift, decided to allow 1 Analyst to work from home, on a target of acheiving 130% of his usual issues, we would have some staff in overnight but decided to put a message on the phones politely explaining the situation and asking customers to raise a ticket if they could due to staffing problems.

Tomorrow brings a new day with new challenges, who and how many will be in work? What will be the fallout of the water damage on staffing? More importantly on volumes, as the BT network takes a hammering with all the water.

Sigh, another day another new challenge!

Ramble over, one of the many trials and tribulations of Support centre management

Caio

Carol 

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With what it probably the heaviest period of sustained rainfall I’ve ever seen in this country, let alone in June, it’s worth bearing in mind that these adverse weather conditions that we are seeing will have an affect on broadband connections.

Many of our customers may see periods of slow speeds and potentially intermittent or sustained loss of connection as a result of the heavy rainfall. As a result of this, PlusNet’s helpline may be extremely busy at times and we would recommend raising any fault via http://help.plus.net after performing the usual hardware and wiring checks.

Here’s to hoping for some more traditional summer weather! Unfortunately there’s no such thing as unlimited sunshine either.

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