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Dave Tomlinson is a familiar name to many customers of PlusNet. Dave has recently started a new Blog on the Community site where he discusses Broadband traffic management and his new role at PlusNet. Read more here.

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A new format presentation this month, just for a change! This month I’ve pulled a number of statistics from different areas.

Most importantly, and as previously published, are our Customer Feedback Survey results. Specifically the “Overall Satisfaction”, which this month showed that 63.3% of customers surveyed responded with “Very” or “Extremely Satisfied”. This shows an ongoing upward trend.

Read more on The Comms Team Blog

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A new format presentation this month, just for a change! This month I’ve pulled a number of statistics from different areas.

Most importantly, and as previously published, are our Customer Feedback Survey results. Specifically the “Overall Satisfaction”, which this month showed that 63.3% of customers surveyed responded with “Very” or “Extremely Satisfied”. This shows an ongoing upward trend.

The Customer Feedback Survey is sent to 1 in 3 identified callers to our Support Centre. This is where our telephone system can identify the customer from the CLI they are calling from.

A new stat this month, and one that we watch very closely indeed, is the number of Ofcom complaints recorded for us. These can be from both customers, or non-customers, and you can see a steady decline over the last 6 months or so. Though we would prefer for this figure to be closer to 0, we’re still in a pretty good position with this regard as far as industry standards go. Being realistic, this is a figure we can at least be fairly happy with.

You can download the Presso in full from here.

More next month. Oh - and watch this space for “Rate My Service”. Enjoy!

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There’s uproar out on the Internet today; Digg.com made some changes to their commenting system.

Yes, you read that right.

For those not in the know, Digg.com is a social bookmarking website with (almost) total democratic editorial control.

Anyone can submit a story or a link to Digg.com and the community at large will determine if it is then promoted to the front page through a user-based ranking system. This differs from the hierarchical editorial system that traditional news-sites employ.

You can see it all going down just here (brace yourselves):
http://digg.com/tech_news/New_Digg_Comment_System_FTL_Old_System_FTW

Previously, Digg.com had a simple commenting system whereby only two levels of comments could be made. The changes they have made in the last few days now allow deep threaded replies.

Now, that’s not so ground-breaking; everyone does that, but the changes that have been made have, in the opinion of many (just read the comments in the link above), rendered the site unusable. It is now slow; very slow. Whereby in the past every comment on an article appeared by default on the main page, the user now has to follow a convoluted, and slow process of revealing each level of comments. This requires a further connection to the server to fetch the additional comments, a process that takes as long as the original page load.

Are they using AJAX technology here for the sake of it? Because it’s cool and what everyone expects of a Web2.0 site? Are the changes enforced due to technical reasons; reducing the load of the back-end database servers? Are the changes meant to save on bandwidth costs as people will not always drill-down to see all the comments, therefore reducing the amount of data requested per page visit?

Who knows. It’s certainly upset the customer though!

The changes that digg.com have made have been on the back of user criticism of the old commenting system. Damned if they do, and damned if they don’t. However, the new solution has created much more unrest than the old system ever did.

All eyes are now on Kevin Rose (Digg.com founder) to see what the response will be. Will they follow the democratic process that is the key tenet of their website and roll-back the changes, or will they dig their heels in and ride out the storm?

To read more about the history of Digg.com, there’s a comprehensive Wikipedia article, here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digg.com

Matt Grest
Head of Future Development
PlusNet

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Introduction

For those that don’t know me my name’s Dave Tomlinson and I’m a member of the PlusNet Comms Team. You may recognise me from such places as the portal forums, Usenet or service status. Recently I’ve also become involved with the product team looking at traffic management.

A key function of this role involves looking at future developments and events that are likely to drive changes in customer behaviours and ultimately impact our network.. The aim of this blog is not only to provide information on day to day management but also to engage our customers to discuss what’s going to happen in the future. Only by sharing information can we ensure we’re managing the network to its optimum and providing the right experience to our customers.

I don’t expect to see an overnight change of opinion from “traffic management is just a way of stopping people from downloading” to “its the greatest thing since cheesy peas!”. What I do hope is that by sharing information people will start to understand the whats, whys and the hows of traffic management and see that it isn’t the big evil some but an essential tool if a service provider is to provide a high Quality of Service for the interactive traffic they want to use whilst sat at the PC or in front of the TV.

The best and most recent example I can give is Wii Mario Strikers. We received numerous complaints from customers that it was unplayable. So we bought a copy, played the game, monitored traffic, identified the default port, configured the network to ensure it’s marked as gaming and now no more complaints. The blog will help us to be more pro-active in identifying new games, technologies and applications and ensure that customers are kept up to date with the changes we make and also feed back to us upcoming changes that we need to make as opposed to having to make re-active changes on the back of customer complaints.

Event Calendar

To get the ball rolling I recently made this post on the PlusNet Community Site about the start of an Internet Event calendar.

The idea of this is to track what’s happening out there on the Internet so that we can be ahead of the game so to speak. We know from historical monitoring of traffic levels that something like Microsoft patch Tuesday will cause an increase in HTTP download traffic in particular on the Tuesday evening around 8-10pm and the Wednesday morning.

By planning for events that can cause spikes in usage or where perhaps new gaming or VoIP signatures are required we can be proactive rather than reactive. Games can be configured before or as they go on sale and we can adjust the rules to take into account for high demands from one off events. This weekend for example is Glastonbury weekend and there’s plenty of coverage from the BBC over the next 10 days and then on Monday it’s the start of Wimbledon fortnight with streaming video available.

What we can therefore do with the traffic management is plan for events like this and ensure the bandwidth is available and that the Quality of Service is there for that bandwidth. It can also work the other way around so that in quiet times we can allocate the spare bandwidth to non-interactive traffic like P2P or Usenet.

By properly managing the traffic on our network we can ensure that period of high demand can take place without impact on interactive traffic. Anyone playing an online game for example when the network is busy wouldn’t see an increase in latency because of the high priority given to gaming traffic.

We can also use the event calendar for tracking new websites and new services. In the past year or so YouTube is one website that’s taken off in an incredible way. Ellacoya’s stats (PDF) show that nearly 10% of all Internet traffic is YouTube, up from 7-8% in just a few weeks. Joost in another site that’s starting to hit the radar hitting about 1% of traffic in USA this month and growing at a rapid rate. In the UK the British broadcasters the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 are looking at a single broadband distribution service codenamed Project Kangaroo. Both of these applications could easily surpass YouTube in the UK bandwidth charts.

It’s not just YouTube and Joost, an hour of surfing MySpace can easily eat 400MB of bandwidth whilst the 2.5 minute HD trailer for Rush Hour 3 from apple.com is about 190MB. With Apple TV due to allow YouTube videos any day now it’s not hard to see where this is leading. And it’s the Quality of Service that our traffic management provides that will ensure that services like this work.

By planning now for what’s happening out there we can stay ahead of the game and this is one area where the community can help play a key part. There’s only so many hours in the day so planning for every event and eventuality isn’t going to be easy but with a little crowdsourcing we can create a more thorough calendar of events so not only catching the biggies like Joost, the next Windows Service Pack or the next big online game but the smaller things as well that could become the next YouTube or have a lesser impact on the network.

It’s an interesting time ahead and I hope my little post hasn’t been too boring, any feedback on what you’d like to hear on the subject of traffic management would be appreciated and can help guide what you want to hear in future posts. My intention is to try and post at least one post a week and try and cover anything of interest, what’s changing out there on the Interweb and how that effects us and you.

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This morning we launched a version of the PlusNet signup pages in Polish. The new page will offer customers a choice of Broadband Your Way Options 1-3, along with technical support in Polish (by phone initially) and a discussion forum on our community site for generic issues and suggestions.

We feel that this launch will offer our Polish customers, prospective customers and their families an opportunity to buy a quality broadband service at a competitive price, with support in their native language and the valuable community input we love here at PlusNet!

Going forwards we will be offering some of our most popular support pages in Polish, and will have tutorials available for common requirements.

Now the Comms Team just need to learn Polish and we’re set!

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I’ve just spent a week in Las Vegas meeting some of the new tech crowd (as well as visiting the casino’s for purely research purposes).

A couple of things were evident whilst there.

[1] The cost of mobile calls whilst in the US were prohibitive. £1.25 per minute to make a mobile call on the cingular network via my vodafone contract (and I’m on a business tariff) and £0.99 per minute to receive a call

[2] Everything in the US is at least 50% cheaper (I bought a top of the range HP laptop for 47% of the price it is here in the UK)

[3] Technology turns up in the UK later than in the US (I bought a 12.1 Megapixel Sony digital camera for $399 which isn’t available in the UK although the 8 Megapixel version is for £349)

The Internet is making is much easier to make informed decisions nowadays about what is fair value and what is old tech whilst the high street retailers continue to peddle the older versions of products.
Whilst the value of online sales in the UK is rapidly growing there is still some way to go to catch up with the USA - and we as consumers are set to benefit (or are we?)

Being a tech geek (I love the latest gadgets) - I’m always looking for the newest and best technology to make my life easier / more interesting etc… But I remember not so long ago when I was happy with the 1 Megapixel camera and the quality of the photo’s it took. Do I really need 12.1 Megapixel’s if all I’m doing is storing them on a digital photo frame capable of presenting them at 800×640 pixels (more than capable of being taken by the 1 megapixel camera).

Moreover, I can’t remember the last time I printed a photo that I took with my camera?

I can’t help but feel I’m on the never ending treadmill of “latest and greatest” as a consumer. My only answer (or the only one I can think up to give to the wife) is I need to use the latest technology to ensure I am up to date with this new technology. But as a consumer I’m starting to feel cheated.

Devices are getting Smaller / Faster / Cheaper so fast now that even I’m beginning to ask - is it worth it to keep up?

Regards

Dean

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As more and more providers move away from the fixed speeds ADSL products, onto the newer fully rate adaptive ones, so to does the number of faults increase.

To many this seems to go against the way the product should work, as it should adapt to current conditions and ensure it is operational. Whilst true, it is only the line conditions at the time of synchronisation that apply, but more importantly, the line is operating as close to its operational limits as much as possible.

Traditional fixed speed services always had cautious line limits set against them and thus had a certain amount of breathing space, but rate adaption leaves little or none.

It is no wonder there can be a large volume of intermittent faults seen from customers moving to the product. For the most part, disconnections should be expected, as the technology isn’t designed to be a fully nailed up and robust. It is after all quite often, working over very old copper cabling.

ISPs are often presented with a problem in that they can only test a connection at one particular point in time. This is often futile and it does not say anything for the line history, leaves us in a situation were no fault is found and we can only ask the customer to monitor.

Sometimes, faults can go on for weeks without any sort of fix and in rare cases, months. Over this time, we collect data from the various tests performed and either a pattern emerges, or we notice things that go on to show either way that BT need to be involved, or a simple lack of understanding on the customers part, in terms of the product or their broadband setup.

BT Wholesale are due to launch a new tool to Broadband providers as a means to help combat this problem. Known as the RRT tool, or Reactive Repair Tool, it will allow a provider to look back at the past 14 days of customer service at the following key piece of data.

• Line rate
  The speed at which the line synchronises
• Noise margin
  The amount of signal relative to the noise on the line
• Line attenuation
  The amount of noise on the line, impact by the quality and length
• Transmition errors
  The mean time between errors that occur on the line
• Uptime
  The number of seconds the line is active in a day
• Initialisations
  The number of times the line resyncs per hour

In each case, it provides the minimum values, maximum values and the average seen over the 14 days. Additionally, a computerised assessment is performed of the test results which can help identify a different fault type to that originally reported or being investigated.

In all, this is a huge step forwards. It reduces the number of times data needs to be collected before a trend can be seen, to the point this may be spotted from the start. It wont assist in all cases, but will ensure that focus is applied in the right places.

Adding to this the recent improvements documented in Recent Improvements to IPStream MAX on the comms blog and with more to come, the experiance is set to get better.

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Over the course of May, BT have made a few improvements to the IPStream Max (Upto 8Mbps broadband) which will benefit both our customers as well as ourselves, if not just for the reduced number of faults raised, also for the additional reporting information that we are able to gain from BTs various systems. 

These improvements consist of: 

• Intelligent profiling on new provides
• Improved customer reporting
• Woosh capped profile names
• Woosh 15.2 deployment

Intelligent profiling on new provides (completed 22/05) 

A number of our customers may have experienced some instability on their IPStream Max service within the first days of the service being provisioned.  This was outlined as an expectation of the quality of service from the outset of IPStream Max being launched. 

BT have now made an improvement to the service so that it assigns what they believe to be the optimal profiled speed and noise margin, giving what should hopefully be stability from the outset of the service.  This should result in less “flapping” during the first ten days as the speeds assigned within the training phase should be that of which would have been calculated after the ten day period has elapsed. 

From a customer perspective, this should result in an improved level of service quality and from our perspective, there should be less calls into the Customer Support Centre from customers who may have potentially seen an intermittent connection from the initial calculation of profile. 

Improved customer reporting (completed 31/05) 

BT have recently implemented a two fold change in the way that they show us how our customers are profiled in their system called “Actuate”. 

Firstly they have changed the way in which they name their different profiles. These will now be visible to us as, for example, “adsl3500”.  The final 4 digits in the profile name represent the maximum level of throughput that the customer will be able to attain, giving us a better understanding of the expected speed, of which we can inform the customer of. 

The other change, which from my perspective, is considerably more useful, is that in Actuate, we are now able to see the last speed at which our customer gained synchronisation at with the exchange, which will have caused a profile change.  Basically, the profiled speed that our customers see are a reflection of the last 15 speeds (within a 30 day period) at which they gained synchronisation.  When a customer calls us to ask why their speeds are slower, we can now inform them easily, about which profile they are on and why this has happened. 

Woosh capped profiles (Completed 31/05) 

BT have also implemented some additional profile names which we are able to see in one of our line testing tools, referred to as “Woosh”.  Occasionally, customers on the IPStream Max services may receive a capped service, which will be either automatically capped or if the line is a  (amusingly named) chronic flapper, whereby the line profile is constantly changing owing to it being a long line, meaning that a capped profile will provide an improved level of speed and stability. 

We are now easily able to see when a line has a capped speed profile assigned to it by running a quick test on Woosh, it will show the profile as, for example “Max 1M C” which means that it is a Max service that has been limited because of it being a chronic flapper :) 

Woosh 15.2 launched (Completed 31/05) 

BT have now released their latest version of the Woosh line testing tool.  This includes a new tool called the DLM Data Tool which shows us a historic break down of various information to do with the max service.  This again will allow us to gain a better understanding as to any service issues a customer may be experiencing and thus allow us to explain the results to our customer more effectively. 

Hopefully this is a good sign of things to come from BT and that further changes to issues such as the 3 day recalculation time for profiles may also be looked into.  More information as I get it!

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Following on from Keith’s May update on the Logged Faults Process, we have pressed forward and continued to drive this process and its success.

Having already seen a significant drop in repeat reports from an average of 21% to 15%, we continue to push and currently sits just below 13%.

The new process has not just enabled us to drive quality to our customers, BT Wholesale have also ranked us very favorably on our quality of the faults process against other BT Wholesale customers.

We hope to soon announce further changes to the process as we review the first set of results from the our faults survey, which a number of customers receive when their fault is resolved.

It looks at various items such as the support systems the customers have access to and how they rank them, through to how we handle the fault itself and what the customer feels we should improve on.

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