Zen took the honours, with O2 being highly commended, each with 6 stars.

More than 14,000 readers voted in this year’s survey, providing in-depth feedback on the products they’ve bought and the level of customer service they received.

 PC Pro Awards 2009

The Top10 judges examined the monthly costs associated with each of the nominated broadband providers and paid close attention to the extras included in the packages. 

On awarding the prize for Best Value Home Broadband, the Top10 judges said: “At just £5.99 a month, Plusnet Value offers the best value home broadband on the market”.

“Good value is not just about the price on the box and Plusnet’s Value Broadband package includes all the trimmings with a free wireless router, 24/7 support, free set up and broadband firewall and spam protection Plusnet show that there’s more to value than upfront costs.”

The survey, now in its fifth year, asked people to provide feedback on the reliability of their connections, the download speeds they achieve and the customer service they receive. 

More than 6,500 PC Advisor readers responded this year, the results providing  insight into broadband customer satisfaction levels in the UK.

O2 took first place with the ‘Best Buy’ award, with Plusnet, BE and Zen being recommended buys.

The PC Advisor 2009 Advisor Broadband Survey is sponsored by http://broadbandgenie.co.uk

Using customer ratings and speed tests over the last 12 months, from around 1.5 million people, makes it one of the most authoritative customer awards for the broadband industry.

Plusnet is shortlisted in two awards:

Best Value Broadband
Best-rated Home Broadband

The awards will be held on September 15th.

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

Firstly, unlike any other browser I’ve used, the URL autocomplete actually works and autocompletes to the URLs I want and not some obscure deep page I visited weeks ago. For example this is what I get when I open a new tab in Opera and type ‘f’ into the address bar:
 

Madness! The situation in Firefox is only marginally better and IE7 is even worse. Now compare this to Chrome:

Facebook and Flickr are the two sites starting with ‘f’ that I visit most often and ‘film 2009′ is a recent search I made starting with ‘f’. Chrome shows me just what I need and no more.

Searching

Searching Google from the omnibox is a doddle (just type in your search and press enter) but it also permits searching other websites. For instance, say I want to search for a photo on Flickr, I simply type ‘fl’:

…press tab…

…type my search terms…

…press enter and voila!

How does it work?

It’s kinda magic but essentially each time you perform a search on a website, Chrome recognises the format of the URL and then allows you to search that site directly from the omnibox. This works for Amazon, Wikipedia, Plus.net… pretty much any site. And the neat thing is you can customise the keyword used for searching by clicking on the spanner icon and going to Options -> Basics -> Default search -> Manage. I often have to look up functions on the PHP website and all I have to do in Chrome is open a new tab and type “php explode” and I’ll be taken straight to the manual page for the explode() function.

The really clever bit

That’s all well and good for sites that have good site search but it’s useless for sites with poor search. The Mozilla Developer Centre, for example, has rubbish search and yet I need it all the time to look up JavaScript functions. So instead I use the power of Google to search the site and take me straight to the first result.

To do this yourself, first you need to craft the URL to do the appropriate search. Use this URL

http://google.com/search?q=site:[url]+%s&btnI=Lucky

but replace [url] with the URL of the site you want to search (for example community.plus.net/blogs/ for this website). The ‘%s’ is a placeholder to tell Chrome where to insert your search terms and the ‘bntl=Lucky’ tricks Google into thinking you clicked on the “I’m feeling lucky” button rather than the standard search button. Now click on the spanner icon in Chrome and go to Options -> Basics -> Default search -> Manage -> Add and enter a descriptive name, a short keyword and the URL you crafted above. For my Mozilla search I used

Name: MDC JavaScript
Keyword: js
URL: http://google.com/search?q=site:developer.mozilla.org/En/Core_JavaScript_1.5_Reference+%s&btnI=Lucky

Now I can just type ‘js string’ into the omnibox, press enter and I’m taken straight to the manual entry for the JavaScript String object.

I think the omnibox rocks. Now can comeone please write an add-on that replicates it in Firefox?!

The full press release is available on the ITV website, but here’s a taster.

“The BBC, ITV and BT today are joining together to work as partners to promote a common industry approach and consumer offer to deliver on demand TV over broadband. The initiative is open for all public service broadcasters, device developers and other ISPs.”

It sounds like this might be an initiative big enough to truly bring TV over broadband from the PC onto the TV. We’re big fans of the BBC iPlayer and like the sound of something that could build on that success. The service will work alongside Freeview and Freesat. Here’s a quote from Ian Livingston, BT’s CEO:

“Television and broadband are a compelling combination. Together they can offer live TV along with an unrivalled choice of on demand content and interactive services. It will mean that you can watch what you want whenever you want on your television. We are looking forward to working with The BBC, ITV and other internet service providers to support an open standard for the free to air market in the UK.”

As we find out more we’ll let you know…

Neil Armstrong
Products Director, Plusnet

Back in June we first wrote about our plans to use BT’s new products to offer our customers faster speeds. We provided an update in September to confirm that our new backhaul link had been successfully installed. From the outset we’ve made it clear that we plan to take things steadily – we and our customers had a tough time in 2006 when the IPStream Max 8Mbps upgrades went a little awry. So this time round we want to be certain we won’t drown in a wave of service issues as customers get faster speeds but less stable lines. So lots of testing is key to that, and the first round of trials involves staff broadband lines.

When the Plusnet product team first asked me if I wanted to be the first staff member to trial ADSL2+ on my line my answer was a very straight ‘no’. Why? Because I rely on my broadband line for working from home. I watch iPlayer most days, I’m always on email and use the web for news, blogs, banking and entertainment. I couldn’t tell you the last time I looked in the Yellow Pages, because like many people now I rely on Google to find everything I want. So the idea of going onto a trial that might mean intermittent service did not appeal at all.

So after half a dozen staff lines had been upgraded (and admittedly a few of those were a bit bumpy!) I finally succumbed to Dave and James’ nagging and the order went into BT Wholesale. My line synchronises to the exchange at 7.5Mbps usually and I get a pretty steady 5 or 6Mbps throughput on speed testers. Despite being a constant web user I rarely use more than 5GB in a month.

My line was upgraded, on time, with no noticeable down-time. Using my existing router, a 2-Wire gateway, I could see that my upstream synch had increased to 855Kbps and speed tests confirmed this. However my downstream synch speed had only increased to about 8Mbps.

Slightly disappointed by this, I followed up with the guys in the office the next day. James checked my router stats (6dBs is apparently pretty good for downstream SNR) and we decided my router was probably the issue. So armed with a shiny new D-Link 2640B I tried again.

Straight away things improved. Synch increased from 7.5Mbps downstream to 12Mbps, upstream stayed the same at 855Kbps. A new speedtest showed the increase in throughput too.

So what of the experience? Well, web browsing seems to be a little snappier. Top Gear looks great in high quality mode on the iPlayer and Skype still works fine for video-conferencing to Japan. I used to get one or two drops in synch a week but so far my line actually seems more stable with ADSL2+ than it did ADSL. All in all I’m happy. But I have a feeling there’s more I can do to get my synch rate up from 12Mbps to perhaps 16Mbps. I’ll keep experimenting and will let you know how I get on.

In the meantime BT has announced a whole load of new exchange go-live dates which you can check at SamKnows or from the Plusnet Usergroup site. The product team will also be back here to update you all on how our testing is going and when we hope to launch upto 24Mbps speeds for our customers to try out. We also need to decide what headline speed to use.

Happy surfing

Neil Armstrong
Products Director, Plusnet

It’s certainly one of the most used and definitely one of the most useful resources that we have. We are, we think, justifiably proud of the way it’s grown and still growing.
It must be a good idea – after all, it’s been adopted by enta.net on their new page. It’s still new, it’s still in the early phases, but it’s polished and the published articles are certainly relevant to the industry (if a little assumptive in places). It’s fantastic that other ISPs are realising the value of this sort of approach, but I can’t help feeling a bit of déja vu while reading. Let’s have a look at what’s on offer, shall we?

ARE YOU ON THE LIST?
There’s no denying it, file sharing is a major internet issue gaining quite a bit of time and space on news programs and in papers. It’s nice to see enta sharing the stance we’ve taken on the same issue.

WARNING: BT ACRONYM OVERLOAD!
I’m not sure about all these shouty titles, I guess that’s just choice of software. They certainly stand out. Hmm, where have I seen updates on 21CN?

ISPS VS IPLAYER: ROUND 2
Blogging about the iPlayer? Tish, tosh and old wet fish. That’s old news now. Do we smell the odour of sour grapes? Simply because our figures enabled PC Pro to work out how much the extra bandwidth was costing and any number of newspapers to understand the impact that iPlayer traffic is having on the ADSL infrastructure as a whole? I’d like to say not. But a line like “As the likes of PlusNet complain that their average cost per user has tripled since the launch of the iPlayer” deserves some comment, I feel. Given that in Dave’s blog about the Plusnet perspective on iPlayer (which unfortunately was not linked) Dave deliberately states that “we love the iPlayer – and I’ll expand on why”. Perhaps sour grapes is a bit harsh – we’ll put that down to lack of research instead.

Flattery, eh? It’ll get you everywhere.

“Let’s get this right – social networking has been around since humans first started walking on the face of the planet.”

As an interesting coincidence this comes out at the same time that LinkedIn and Huddle announce a link-up. At Plusnet we use LinkedIn for recruitment and business development. Pretty much all of our staff use Facebook on a daily basis too. We’ve also played around with Huddle before as it has some interesting similarities to our own Workplace system.

Talking of Workplace, we’ve just been identified by Information Age, a US-based publication, as ‘One of 10 outstanding Web 2.0 success stories‘.

Which is nice

Neil Armstrong
Products Director, Plusnet