Following on from the one and only Carl Baker’s appearance on Sky Sports, and his now infamous victory over ex-world heavyweight champion Danny Williams, we’re excited to announce yet another TV appearance by a Plusnetter!
Gordon Vaughan, clearly demonstrating that he’s smarter than the average business and partner staffer, will be putting his wits to the test on today’s Channel 4’s legendary Countdown! Not quite as dangerous as the 3 rounds with the Brixton Bomber but equally taxing on the old grey matter!
If you want to catch Gordon, he makes his appearance at 3.25pm on Channel 4.
Good luck Flash, knock ‘em dead.
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
This is a quick update to the blog published last week about the Postal Strikes currently affecting customers in the UK.
An announcement is due later today but it’s looking like strike action is set to resume tomorrow.
Once again, we’ll be using ParcelForce to deliver hardware during the strike so delays should be avoided.
You can read more about the strikes and what will happen over on the BBC News site.
If any of our plans change, or the strikes are cancelled, we’ll update this blog to let you know.
Why Hello!
I’ve been a little slack in my End Of Week editing duties recently, mostly due to my being away on holiday to Istanbul, but I’m back now and Andy B has quickly jumped on me to get back on the wagon.
Well, what a week to pick up for editing! Our Development department has been furiously busy getting our new product set ready for it’s roll out in the really unsociable hours of Thursday morning and since then we’ve been working to make it it’s all working correctly.
That’s meant a couple of late nights for the team, but that’s to be expected on a project as large as this one. If you aren’t sure what I’m talking about, go and read our announcement for Up to 20Mb.
We’ve been juggling this with a couple of issues with our Faults platform as well, so apologies if you’ve seen any issues when trying to raising us one.
What updates do we have from the other teams? First up is Barbara from the HR Team.
Healthy food, walking to work (bus strike), signing up to be blood donors, relaxation techniques learnt, sugar levels and blood pressure checked, ways to stop smoking discussed, reflexology and massage tasters sampled, goody bags received phew!
Therese and Gemma have also had chance to up sticks and have now joined the CSC floor, by taking up residence in room 7; Jen, Laura, and me have decided to stay with Dev (we’ve got used to them passing though; they also make us nice cups of coffee from time to time).
We’ve also organised TSA and CSA interviews (Ed: Technical and Customer Support Advisors!), prepared MDLP (Ed: Management Development and Leadership Program) module 2 information and facilities; communicated final levelling scores to management, made amendments to the Company Handbook which will be posted in the near future, and held D&G workshops for managers. Happy birthday to Laura on Monday too!
Cheers Barbs!
Next up, Jonathan from the Web Gang
Goodness, that was the week that was! It’s been a busy one with the product launch. We’ve also been fixing problems, some nips and tucks and a few smoothed out lumps and bumps.
Never one to avoid work, Nick went on holiday, the slacker. I’ve been suffering from PMF (Peruvian Man Flu), but battling through. Sam enjoyed his massage, courtesy of our Health and Safety Week offerings. Gary has been drinking tea like there’s no tomorrow and Jonny has been letting others make him tea, a shining example of a natural delegator. Last but not least, Phil said “no” when asked if he wanted me to write anything on his behalf.
We’re off to recharge the batteries. Have a good weekend, everyone.
Alex from Technical Support
Lots of new things to learn and new questions to answer this week with the changes to our residential products. Not only have we released our new PlusNet Premium package but our entire signup journey now allows customers to take advantage of BT’s new 21cn network (up to 20mbps speed where available). Although these changes may seem small from a customer point of view the changes on our side have been huge!
Aside from all things new we have had our usual busy evenings on calls, busier than normal in fact. This may be due to some issues with our automatic systems which will deal with raising new broadband faults. Some customers (and us of course) have had problems raising faults which has inevitably caused a rise in the number of calls that come in to our contact centre.
Also in the CSC this week we have also put up a large motor racing track poster on the wall in the shape of the PlusNet logo. Next to this is a list of all the major Formula 1 constructors…. more to come about this later.
I’ll sign off at this point, back to work for me. Enjoy the weekend all.
Finally, Andy from the Consumer Team. Who you say? We used to call them the Marketing Team!
It’s been a busy week for the Consumer team. This week our new broadband product has been rolled out for new and existing customers – Plusnet Premium. Our Pro package has been tweaked too, and now offers 20GB peak time usage, which is up from 15GB (pricing remains the same). Our home phone products have changed too, so our current range of products now offer free 0845 and 0870 calls in their inclusive talk time.
On top of this, we’ve talked about our future plans for colouring in, posting things that we’ve coloured in, sent the newsletter (well, sort of, depending on who you speak to), and updated our Pro customers on their usage change. Chris has had an astonishing week too, well, when he hasn’t been driven to distraction by the ongoing Cheryl v. Whitney debate. He’s actually used another program other than Excel for a change, and made some pretty slides in PowerPoint. I’m jealous, as I only got to make one slide this week. We love PowerPoint up here
Ooh, stop press, PJ has appeared with a last minute post from his crew.
Not much to report this week. It’s pretty quiet really so I’ve given the guys the day off. Ha! They wish.
Only joking of course. It’s been well, what’s the word? Busy. Yes, that blooming ‘b’ word again. But honestly what can I say? It’s been a busy week.
It’s nice to be finally live with the up to 20Mbps products finally. And pleasing that all the hard work that has gone into preparing the support content and FAQs seems to have led to a smooth product launch from our perspective. There’s an awful lot of prep work that goes into a product launch and this has been one of the biggest in quite some time.
We’ve had Mike training the call centres on the new products over the past 3 weeks. Putting together the training material was pretty demanding on both him and Mand, who was instrumental in collating the facts and key points about the new products. Mike, Mand, Matt, Brad & Chris in the UK and Justin in SA all helped to deliver the training in time for launch.
So, as I look over the floor and see the last few developers starting to finish up on their bug squashing and report writing for the week, I think it’s time I left. Off to the bouldering wall for me I think. Or to the pub perhaps, we certainly all deserve a beer!
Oh, btw, you can follow us on Twitter if you are into that sort of thing: http://twitter.com/plusnet
Today’s an exciting one for Plusnet, as we’re launching our first up to 20Mb broadband products – Premium and Pro. Over the last few months, together with our many customer volunteers, we’ve trialed the service itself; along with the new ordering and ‘back-end’ processes that go with it.
Our new products offer our customers a greatly increased usage allowance as well as the potential for much higher speeds.
For all of our products, usage between midnight and 8am is free and doesn’t count towards your usage allowance.
Premium will cost £11.99 for the first 3 months and then just £15.99 if you’re in a low-cost area: see http://usertools.plus.net/exchanges/ - if not it’s still great value at £19.99.
You can see the costs, speeds and usage of the products in this table.
If you’re already a customer and want the faster speeds, don’t worry. Provided your exchange has been enabled, we’ll be upgrading customers on certain older products in stages over the coming year. We’ll let you know more about this soon. Although ADSL2+ isn’t yet available to all, coverage in the UK is increasing rapidly and currently is around 40% of the population.
Along with potentially faster speeds, ADSL2+ (up to 20Mb) allows us to offer a much improved order journey. During the signup process we’ll ask you for your mobile number and keep you up to date with the progress of your broadband order through SMS text messages.
All of our products now have a 12 month contract or a no contract option. If you move to another provider within the first year you’ll just need to pay us back any setup or hardware costs you didn’t need to pay upfront.
We’ve got more details of the new product and changes to the existing ones on the ADSL2+ Community FAQ here.
If you want to ask us questions about this blog, or would just like to discuss it, you’ll be able to over on the discussion forums.
We’re a bit late announcing the news however we lit the final segment of the inventively named ‘Plusnet 14′ on Monday. For those that don’t know, Plusnet 14 is our most recently installed 622Mbps pipe of central capacity.
That’s two whole 622Mbps pipes we’ve lit since July! 
Those that have been suffering from the recent peak time speed problems will be pleased to hear that we’re not going to stop there either! We’ve more capacity scheduled to be lit next week too!
Anybody connecting to the new segment will see their traffic passing through the gateway known as thn-ag1. You can find out what gateway you’re connected to by running a traceroute or using the Gateway Checker on the Usertools website (this might not work if you’re a Madasafish customer).
When adding new capacity it can take some time for the network to ‘balance’ i.e. distribute users evenly across gateways. In order to accelerate this process it is sometimes necessary for us to temporarily disconnect a small number of customers from the Internet. We’ve no intention of doing this at the moment but if that changes we’ll let you know via our Service Status and Twitter feeds.
If you’ve seen the news at all recently then you’ll already know about the postal strikes that are planned for Thursday and Friday this week.
We use Royal Mail to deliver hardware to our customers, so to avoid the chance of delays we’ve decided to switch to ParcelForce while the strikes are in effect. Deliveries won’t need to be signed for so it should be business as usual.
You can read more about the strikes and what will happen over on the BBC News site.
If any of our plans change, or the strikes are cancelled, we’ll update this blog to let you know.
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Welcome to the latest edition of Plus, the Plusnet Newsletter This summer we launched our first big advertising campaign, which has been focussed on London. Regular visitors to the capital and Londoners won’t have been able to miss our ads across the Underground, and viewers of ITV London will have seen Plusnet on TV for the first time too, as we’ve been sponsoring the ITV London Weekday Weather. As part of the campaign we’re running a competition to win an iPod, so read on to find out how you could get hold of one of Apple’s latest gadgets. Just a few weeks ago we won the award for ‘Best Value Home Broadband’ at this year’s Top 10 Broadband Awards’. It’s always great to get industry recognition for our products so we’re very excited here at Plusnet Towers! PC Advisor also gave us a ‘Recommended’ accolade in their 2009 Broadband Survey, based on results from over 6,500 people who were asked to rate the reliability of their connections, their download speeds and the customer service they receive. We also have great news for our Plusnet Home Phone Talk customers – see below for more information about the changes we’re making from 22nd October which we think you’ll be really pleased with. One final thing – don’t forget that the Discussion Forums are the perfect place to get advice from fellow customers or members of the Plusnet Team. If you’ve not yet joined the Community, I’ve included a very quick guide showing how you can get involved at the end of this newsletter. Thanks for reading, Anthony Vollmer Contents
We’re pleased to announce that our Evenings & Weekends and Anytime Talk Plans will include FREE calls to 0845 and 0870 numbers from 22nd October*, and earlier this month we sent notifications about this change to our existing Home Phone customers. If you’re not already enjoying one of our great value Home Phone products you can get full details on all the other features here. 2. Recommend a friend for even cheaper broadband Back in April the folks over at uSwitch found from their Broadband Customer Satisfaction survey that 8 out of 10 of Plusnet customers would recommend us to a friend. This isn’t just a meaningless statistic though – don’t forget that you save money every month for each person you recommend to Plusnet. We give away over £45,000 per month in discounts to our customers who refer so make sure you get some of the share! Our My Referrals page has more helpful hitns and tips on how to refer. 3. London Calling – 8 out of 10 Plusnet customers would recommend us to a friend Finding out that 8 out of 10 of our customers would recommend us made us so happy that we decided to tell everyone in London about it through in our new marketing campaign which has been all over tubes, buses, the TV and the press. 4. Win an iPod As our London campaign is centred around recommendation we’ve decided to run a competition to see who can come up with the most creative list of the things that they would recommend. If you’d like the chance to win an iPod simply put together a list of 8 things you’d recommend and why, and mail your entry to 8outof10@plus.net. For some inspiration and competition rules, check out this blog about our London campaign. Entries don’t need to be just about the internet or Plusnet, and the funnier and wittier the better. The deadline for entries has been extended to 31st October. 5. It’s official – Plusnet is the best value home broadband provider In September we won another award to add to our collection – at this year’s prestigious Top 10 Broadband Awards we scooped the award for ‘Best Value Broadband Provider’. Hurrah! 6. Fibre optic broadband trial Earlier this year we announced that we’d be trialling new, superfast broadband using fibre optic cable. Our first handful of customers on the Muswell Hill and Whitchurch exchanges are now live and enjoying faster speeds. Take a look at this blog over on the Community Site to find out more about the trial. The Discussion Forums on the Community Site are the ideal place to ask for advice before contacting the support team by phone or ticket. Whatever your question you can be sure another customer has either seen it before or can point you in the right direction. If not, our staff will be there to give a helping hand. Of course, you can always just have a friendly chat with other customers If you’ve never used the Discussion Forums before, you’ll need to register a new username and password, which is really easy to do and takes just a minute or two. Follow the steps here to register. Once you’ve logged in using your normal account details, you just need to set-up a separate username and password for Community. This newsletter has been sent to you as a valued customer of Plusnet. If you would like to change your preferences for the electronic communication you receive from us, please click here. Please note that by changing your preferences, you will no longer receive other promotional communications from Plusnet, including free gifts, details of competitions and information about new products and services. *Inclusive calls to 0845 and 0870 numbers have a maximum call duration of 60 minutes. Redial to avoid charges. Calls to indirect access numbers and dial up internet access are excluded. See website for details. Email ref: E_200910News Plusnet plc |
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Hello Readers!
It’s the end of another working week here in Plusnet Towers, a little later than planned and I’m now on a double brace! I’ve been quite busy and not really had the chance to arrange anyone for today but I promise there’ll be a different editor next week!
On with the show then, it’ll be a quick one this week I think. First we have Rohan from the CSC…
What can I say, its been a great week for the Provisioning Department, and all thanks are due to Karen the Faults and Provisioning Service Delivery Manager who has done a awesome job at creating all the new processes that has made the Prov department shine in the lime light once again. Hats off to this great team that never gives up on any task assigned to them and always makes working with them a pleasure.
and finally Jen from HR, who was drafted in to do this at the last minute after a rota mix-up!
It’s quite amusing that I’m writing this as I’ve only been in today. However I believe the rest of the team have been doing an upgrade to our HR system with help from Jamie in IT.
This means that all day we’ve been getting messages along the lines of:
‘can u reset my ciphr password pls or do i need to raise a task?’
(Yes, you know who you are…)
Amongst other stuff we also had a team meeting today and I did a very interesting update on employment law (well I thought it was very interesting, anyway). We’ve also been updating our people plan, where we decide what we’re going to be working on for the next few months. Watch this space for more….
As well as this, we had new starters on Monday so they were inducted. Planning for Health and Safety week has continued – I don’t think this has escaped the notice of a single person in the building. Oh, and of course, it’s that time in the quarter when we collate everyone’s performance review ratings. We’re still in the dark about what we all actually got though for now.
That’ll be all from me…..
Cheers Jen! – I dunno what we’d do without you.
And thats your lot I’m afraid… see you soon!
Hello readers!
Today marks the day that I complete an EOW hat-trick! Ali was down to edit today but unfortunately he’s off ill so I’ve had to step in.
I was actually going to do the Comms team update so I suppose I’ll start with.. Me!
Interesting… not often I get to quote myself!
The team have been super busy as always, mainly with this – if not the eating then the constant procession of people wanting a sample for themselves..
Ta ta!
A shoddy short update from me there, I think I just wanted to show off about the stash!
Let’s get things back on track, here’s Carl from Networks…
We’ve been working on the migration into our new Primary data center that should be complete by mid-November. This week we have moved a number of databases, moved over to brand new hardware for our usage accounting/charging platform known as CBC, moved some internal servers and been preparing for the email storage move that starts from 11pm tonight till 11pm Saturday night.
We’ve also been working on our long term solutions for Internet Transit, Wholesale broadband capacity and email storage.
Next it’s the ever reliable Jen from HR…
It’s that time in the quarter when we should have all had our performance reviews. In HR, we’ve been reminding all the managers that we need the ratings back by the end of today. We’ve also been creating reports on what everyone has been up to over the last three months from their employee records on our HR system.
On the resourcing front, it’s been all the usual stuff, such as recruitment, plus updating role profiles and the organisation charts.
The most exciting thing we’ve been doing though, is the Healthy Workplaces Week for 19th-26th October and preparations are nearly finalised. So, be prepared to stop smoking, start exercising and get eating your 5-a-day. Maybe HR could start by setting an example….(not naming any names!!).
Anyway, I’ll keep it brief. It is Friday afternoon after all. Enjoy the weekend!
And finally, Vershan from the CSC…
From the Faults guys in Sunny SA we would like to firstly congratulate Preeshan Reddy on his new role as Service Delivery Manager. Well done!!! It has been a relatively uneventful week for the team. Faults volumes have been steady while we have noticed an increase in the number of customers reporting speed problems which are related to VP issues. These issues are currently under control and are been investigated by our suppliers.
In a Nut shell everything has been under control thus far and we are looking forward towards an awesome week ahead.
Excellent, I think that’s all for now.
See you soon!
Here at Plusnet we're always trying to use clever open source things to make our lives easier. Sometimes we write our own and make other people's lives easier too!
We sell broadband, phone, VoIP and more to homes and businesses in the UK. Winner of 9 out of 11 Categories in the 2008 USwitch survey. Winner of "Best Consumer ISP" at 2008 ISPA awards. Voted number 1 in the Broadband Choices 2008 survey.
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