PlusNet Community Website

Each year, we publish what we plan to do over the course of the year. You can see what we set out to do last year in our Plans for 2007 post and what we actually did in our update. We might have bitten off more than we could chew…

Here is a quick review of last year and a view of our plans for the next 12 months. So read on to find out what’s coming up More…

13 Comments »

A few weeks ago Ashley Highfield, former Director of Future Media & Technology at the BBC, posted an article called the “Hidden Costs” of Watching TV Online. It makes for an interesting read and is a good starting point for having a debate on this topic. Ashley raised 19 potential ‘actions’ although stressed that these weren’t necessarily his opinion. More…

11 Comments »

Good news today came in the form of a BBC news article covering the results from the recent customer satisfaction survey carried out by consumer comparison site Broadband Choices.

The survey of 4,000 broadband households, conducted by independent research and consulting agency YouGov, asked consumers to rate their ISP against various criteria including quality and reliability, download time, clarity of billing and pricing, after sales support, value for money and speed of service activation.

PlusNet topped the table with a massive *79%* of PlusNet customers that were surveyed saying they were satisfied with their broadband service across *all six categories*.

More…

9 Comments »

After reading and discussing some of the comments on our recent iPlayer usage blog and the follow-up I thought that for the next topic it would probably be useful to put together a piece on how UK ISPs like PlusNet are charged for the broadband services that they provide. More…

11 Comments »

There’s been a lot of talk in the media about the BBC’s iPlayer in the past few weeks with stories on The Register such as this and this, The Guardian here and here, ThinkBroadband, Screendigest, ZDNet, and hundreds more on other places too, some of which are linked here.

There’s also been lots of talk about the availability of iPlayer, there’s news about plans for the Mac version and a US version too is apparently on the way.

We, though, can give a different perspective, a bit of insight on things and maybe explode a few myths. Here’s just a few headlines:

• 5% growth in total average usage since 1st December
• 66% growth in volume of streaming  traffic since 1st December
• 2% growth in the number of customers using their connection for streaming since 1st December
• 72% growth in the number of customers using over 250MB of streaming in a month since December
• 100% growth in the number of customers using over 1GB of streaming in a month since December
• Cost of carrying streaming traffic increased from £17,233 to £51,700 per month More…

  54 Comments »

We would like to announce that we have now activated an additional 155Mbps segment of BT central bandwidth. Customers connecting to the new segment will be terminated on the gateway thn-ag3. The new capacity has been activated in line with the current budget and projected growth in customer numbers. More…

No Comments »

Every year Best Companies and The Sunday Times work together to publish the Best 100 Companies to work for list. Over 140,000 employees across the UK have completed a survey in the last few months to reveal what they really think of their employers! More…

No Comments »

We hope you have a pleasant journey!

Well, we’ve finally done it!

And what a tremendous piece of work it has been for all those involved.

Yesterday we completed the particularly mammoth task that has involved moving all of our customers’ email over to our brand new mail platform based on the NetApp FAS3070 storage system.

It’s no big secret that email has been a sore point for us in the past and this is a monumental stepping stone towards reinstating the faith and trust we believe every customer deserves to have when it comes to the provisioning of their email services.

For anyone interested in the background behind this work or for those that missed it first time round, you’ll find my original forum posts below that go into specific detail regarding the problems we’ve had along with a technical overview of the mail platform:

PlusNet
Force9
FreeOnline
Metronet

The new implementation will go a long way towards fixing these issues.

I hope you’ll all join everyone here at PN towers in congratulating the engineers responsible for bringing this project to completion not only quickly and efficiently but with minimum disruption to customers’ service and only a few minor hiccups along the way (Hey nobody’s perfect!).

Here’s to the new storage platform and here’s to a new era!

Out with the old…

The NetApp FAS940 and Sun Storagetek 5310

In with the new…

The NetApp FAS3070

It’s not just the storage platform that’s had an overhaul. During the last few months we’ve also kitted our mxcore mail delivery platform out with a £120,000 re-fit and almost doubled the capacity of our mail collection servers. That’s not all we’ve done, we’ve introduced monitoring improvements, additional housekeeping and improved the way the platform handles spam.

All of this puts us well on our way to ensuring the problems of the past remain exactly that!

Rest assured we’re not going to put our feet up now. Oh no siree! Over the coming months we’ll be continuing to aim towards delivering a service that exceeds the customer expectation.

The hard work doesn’t stop here, but if anyone has any questions about this particular piece of work or the mail platform in general then feel free to leave a comment or join in the debate over on the portal forums.

No Comments »