For almost a month now, we’ve been offering new phone line installations at a special low price of just £49.99 to our home broadband customers.  That’s less than half of the wholesale cost.

Now there’s even better news. We’re extending the offer right through until the 31st January 2010.
If you need to, now is the perfect time to get one installed – just call our sales line on 0845 140 0200 and we’ll do the rest.

Remember, you get a regular monthly discount for every person you refer to us who goes on to become a customer. Find out about My Referrals.

Customers connecting to the new segment will see their traffic routed through the gateway known as thn-ag2.

Whilst on the topic we also increased the bandwidth available on our 21CN network earlier today, this will benefit our Up to 20Mbps ADSL2+ customers and any ‘Up to 8Mbps’ customers who we recently emailed about moving across to the 21CN network.

Following on from the BBC’s Watchdog report last night about Wifi security, we’ve been receiving a number of calls from concerned customers worried that their wireless router is not secure.

Here’s some basic advice and we’ll show you where to get some guidance on how to protect your wireless network.

We take your security seriously and, provided you take simple steps to make sure protection is enabled, you shouldn’t be overly anxious about your home network.

Wifi-networks are protected using a passkey system, generally using WPA or the even more secure WPA2-PSK system. The Thomson gateway 585v7 we supply is configured to use WPA security by default. This will work with most Wifi devices and if you’ve got one of these your network should be protected.

If you want to make sure your home Wifi network is secure then we have a guide on securing your wireless on our support pages.

Don’t forget though. If you do change your SSID or your passkey, remember to make the same changes on your Wifi-enabled computer or laptop too, otherwise you won’t connect to your home network.

Public Hotspots

Last night’s watchdog report focused on Wifi hotspots. You’ll find these at airports, cafe etc and are designed for anyone to be able to connect to them, often free-of-charge. This is very different to your home network where you can restrict who has access to it by choosing to use WPA or WPA2 security and setting the passkey.

If you do use Wifi hotspots when you take your laptop out and about, make sure that the security software on your computer is up to date and you have an anti-virus and firewall installed.

If you have any important emails which contain confidential information, try and avoid sending these from unsecure public Wifi hotspots as this increase the risk of the contents being intercepted and read by hackers.

Remember:
When you’re not using the wireless signal on the router you should turn this off.

If you’ve got any questions about wireless security please pop over to our discussion forums.

Chris

That’s right, we’ve lit another 155Mb of central capacity, that’s 4 segments lit within the last month.

The data you use on your broadband connection travels across these segments of capacity, so in basic terms we’ve just increased the amount of bandwidth available for all your internet needs.

If you connect to this segment you’ll see a connection to PCL-AG02 when you look at tracerts or use the Gateway checker.

This is the first new segment on “Plusnet 14″.

As ever when adding new capacity it can take some time for the network to ‘balance’ (i.e. distribute users evenly across gateways) and sometimes it is necessary for us to disconnect a number of users in order to accelerate this process. At present there are no plans to take any action of this kind however we’ll let you know if that changes via a service status post.

There’s an RSS feed for service status at http://usertools.plus.net/status/status.xml if you wish – this also propagates to our twitter feed so you can get status update notifications by following us at http://twitter.com/plusnet too.

Our new products start at just £10 for the entry level service, perfect for the small/home office in the current climate.

For the first time ever you’ll now be able to add a Business line rental and call plan to your broadband choice from us.

So what are the new products?

The new products will have 3 broadband options, and two fixed line ‘phone options.

You can see the new product pages from the links below.

Business Broadband

Business Phone

What’s new?

Our business products now follow our recent changes in residential products, in that we have introduced geographic pricing.
This means that approximately 70% of the UK will qualify for a cheaper broadband service, due to Ofcom deregulation.

You’ll get the usual excellent service you expect from us (including dedicated business support based in Sheffield), but at a much more competitive price.

We’ve also introduced clear usage limits on the entry level products, and made the terms and conditions clearer.

You still get all the benefits you’d expect from a Plusnet Business product, including webspace, domain hosting, and VoIP. You can also tailor your broadband connection with Max Premium (ideal for a higher upload speed) and Enhanced Care (prioritised BT fault response)

What about existing customers?

If you’re an existing customer you can upgrade to the new products immediately. We know from feedback that the new products have been eagerly anticipated for a while now, and hope you’ll be very pleased with what we have come up with.

What else do I need to know?

We know there will probably be other stuff you want to know before considering the new products, so the important links are below:

Expected Speeds.
FAQ and Guides.

If you’d like to discuss the new products, or anything else, please join us over on our Community Site forums. We look forward to seeing you there.

http://community.plus.net/library

If you’ve ever fancied yourself as a bit of a writer of help pages then here’s your big chance. The new Support Library beta means that if you’re registered as a Community Site user you can create articles about pretty much anything related to Plusnet services, so long as you think it will be of value to the community.

You’ll also be able to edit existing articles, so in a Wikipedia-type way, we hope that collective brainpower will create some great new help pages.  As you’ll see we’ve already started it off. There are some articles we’ve already moved across from the main support site that we think you’d relish getting your hands on.

But don’t fret if you’re not interested in writing yourself.. the idea is to provide a platform for a broad range of interesting and up-to-date tutorials on topics that we wouldn’t see in our ‘official’ support pages. And if there’s a topic you’d like to see written about why not ask in the Forums?  Oh, and my team will be writing for this too (did I say that?) so we’ll be on hand if you get stuck.

This is released as a beta trial.  It’s not without its blemishes and we’re looking for plenty of feedback about how you think it could be improved.

How does it work?

As a standard user you’ll be able to add new articles (see the guide here) and edit existing ones.  When you submit your changes you won’t be able to see the edits go live until they are approved by the Support Library beta moderators.  Your articles will remain in draft until the moderators approve it.

We’ve got a small moderation team and will be looking for volunteers to help us with this to make sure all the new content is useful, accurate and correctly assigned to categories.

In time we’ll look to include the new content into the Search of our main website so that new customers will find your Support content along with our own.

Plusnet Community Support Library beta goes live Thursday 23^rd July 2009.

Please read the ‘What is this all about?’ section on the front page before writing a new article or editing any existing ones.

At Plusnet we want to keep moving forwards and have more people aware of our brand and products. To aid this, we’ll soon be sponsoring the ITV daily London weather.

As you can see there aren’t any big changes to the ‘look and feel’ of Plusnet.  The familiar sunny landscape has been given life and we hope that these ‘idents’ will help get our brand and products more widely known.

We’ve been given a fantastic opportunity in the London area to make this happen. The first ident will be seen on the 24th July, if you want a sneak peak take a look below.

This will be shown at the beginning of the ITV London Weather, there is also a shorter version to show at the end, you can see this here.

If you’re in and around London over the next few months, keep you eye out for Plusnet you may see and hear our name across more formats.

We’ve activated this extra capacity in line with the current budget and our projected growth in customer numbers.

When new capacity is added to the network, it takes time for the network to balance and for a representative proportion of the customer base to connect to the new segment. In order to speed up this process we might need to briefly disconnect some broadband customers from the Internet.

If we decide to do this then we’ll announce further details as a planned maintenance notice nearer the time.

After reading Matt’s Twitter blog that he published a couple of weeks ago, I thought I’d take the opportunity to write a follow-up piece about my own experiences with the increasingly popular micro-blogging cum social networking service of the moment.

What I found particularly interesting about Matt’s blog were some of the comments that readers had left. Whilst there aren’t many, what is evident from these comments is something that I’ve noticed on a much larger scale when chatting to friends, family and work associates about the new social networking phenomena – You either love it, or you hate it!

It wouldn’t be the first time that I’ve seen this love/hate separation either. I remember there being a similar apprehension and reluctance to get involved when Facebook was still in it’s early days. Nowadays though, with more than 200 million users worldwide, it’s unusual to come across a person who *hasn’t* got a profile on the social networking behemoth. Will we see the same take up and general acceptance of Twitter as a social networking medium? A market research company called Nielsen Online have already published figures showing that Twitter take up in the UK grew by a massive 1,689% from February 2008 to February 2009 alone – That’s an estimated 1.78 million UK adopters!

I have to admit that I’m one of Twitter’s admirers. I’ve been well and truly sucked in and find it an extremely useful tool as both a source of news and as a real-time search engine. Let me provide you with an example of the latter:

Back in January, Google experienced a problem that caused all search results to be flagged as malware. I happened to be online when this happened and wondered whether or not it was a problem at my end or something that was affecting other users too. The problem was only evident for a short period of time, but whilst it was happening there was no acknowledgement of the problem’s existence on Google’s blog, neither did a Google search return any similar reports of problems. It was at this point that I turned to Twitter’s search API. By entering the search term ‘google’ I knew immediately that it wasn’t just me experiencing problems as there were countless other reports on the ‘Twittersphere’ from users having exactly the same problem as.

That’s one of the things I like about Twitter, there’s no ‘proper’ way to use it and different people use it in different ways. I use my personal account to keep in touch with my friends, keep up to date with the latest news and discover new and entertaining stuff on the web. On the other hand, I use Plusnet’s Twitter account to offer support to our customers, post service announcements and promote the company brand.

Whether you love it or hate it Twitter seems to be eveywhere you look. It’s in the papers, it’s getting parodied, celebrities are getting in on the act and there’s even a fan club to show appreciation for the loveable (if not slightly frustrating) ‘fail whale’ that appears when Twitter’s servers are under load!

YouTube have recently added a Twitter button to their video clips and Vodafone have recently announced that they’ve started offering a free SMS service for Twitter users in the UK (something that has been available in the states since the social networking site’s inception, but was withdrawn for users this side of the pond last year due to the ‘high costs of mobile text messaging in the UK’ ).

Whichever way you look at it, it seems like Twitter’s here to stay. One thing that does remain unclear though is what the future holds for the micro-blogging phenomena. After all, it costs money to run a service like Twitter and one has to question what revenue, if any, the site brings in. Last month there were claims that Twitter may soon start charging for corporate use and there was even speculation at one point that Google were looking to buy the company (which some might argue isn’t a great idea). In a recent blog post, Twitter founder Biz Stone posted that “…we hope to begin iterating on revenue products this year.” In the same piece however, he also goes onto say “…whatever we come up with, Twitter will remain free to use by everyone—individuals, companies, celebrities etc.” – I’ll leave it to you the reader to make of that what you will.

So there you have it, love it or loathe it I don’t think we’ve heard the last of Twitter and I can only see it increasing in popularity as the year progresses. If you’re already using Twitter then make sure you visit our page and follow Plusnet. If you’re not using Twitter then what are you waiting for? You never know, you might actually like it!

.

Bob Pullen
Plusnet Comms Team

Click this link to cast your vote. You’ll also be able to test the speed of your connection at the voting page.

Once you’ve voted you’ll be automatically entered into a prize draw for a Shuttle PC bundle worth over £1000. To enter your vote, visit the link we’ve given you and take the home broadband connection survey.

Voting runs until the 31st May, so get clicking and vote for us.

We’ll be back with the results when they are available, so watch this space.

Thanks for reading,

Chris