Henry here from Development, I have been “nominated” to be the end of dayer today…

Well I say nominated, but I think it was by default more than anything else. Still, it gives me a chance to speak to you lot.

Today, as always, we have been busy with our projects and bug fixing. I have been lucky enough to get some hands on experience with our build box. This allows us to see code metrics, and highlights areas for improvement which is always good news in my opinion.

Also, there seems to be the beginnings of a plan to give a presentation at the forthcoming PHP North West Conference. Currently we are thinking of:

• Migrating our version control system from CVS to Git
• Our Agile development processes
• Implementing a modern framework alongside vast amounts of legacy code, and the implications thereof

Some really exciting stuff there, but what do you think? What would you like to see us talk about at the conference? Thoughts on a postcard (A reply below will do).

Ciao

James from the Comms Team

Hello again from your Comms Team.

We had a bit of a discussion about hair on Friday night and it seems that none of us are doing too well. Bob’s lost all of his, Mark’s known as the “Silver Fox”, Matt keeps on shaving his off, so he’s probably trying to hide something, Chris is looking a bit patchy and mines trying to go backwards and generating clumps of grey. Joys of late twenties The things you talk about after work….

But anyway.

I’ve been spending most of my day looking at Broadband orders as well as taking some Tech and Customer Service calls before jumping into our forums this afternoon.

Chris has been looking after Networks CCs as well as handling a number of faults and taking some calls.

Bob says he’s been sending a phishing email to MAAF customers, although he quickly rephrased that, I’m going to stick to his original wording! (Ed: Don’t worry, he hasn’t! It was a warning about a phishing email.) He’s also been looking into a couple of JLP issues.

Matt’s been in a bunch of meetings and looking at faults and home phone. He also apparently wants to lick Steve, but I don’t think we should talk about that too much. (Ed: Scandal! Hang on, which Steve? We have quite a few!)

Hmm. Random link.

Topical

Bye for now

Captain Random Aaron from Networks next

• Ben: On monitoring
• Matt: Doing tickets, mentoring, and helping out with an Ellacoya profiling problem.
• Sarah: Testing the new IVR platform and doing some load balancer migration work.
• Russell: Working on an ADSL bonding problem.
• Rizwan: Problems Problems (Solutions Solutions)
• Denis: Updating docs for MPLS to SA, meeting with Foundry, working on kit list for the datacentre.
• Kevin: P995 Migrations, JTN/PAYH support and payments.
• Richard: Investigating & fixing problems with internal staging & roll out systems.
• Simon: Documentation, problems and cursing the price of holidays in the school holidays.
• Dan: Tickets, Squid, and abusing Alan
• Josh: Doing the kick off work for some huge up and coming projects and some more RADIUS changes to fix bugs for new products.
• Mike: PAYH planning, Dev DB assistance, reviewing project docs, Apache upgrades followup and chasing up hardware.
• Me: Changing my name to Alan, by popular demand. I’ve also made it to my second box of Qi, which has a blueberry twist. Don’t buy this, it tastes like Lemsip*.
• Geoff: Working on creating new authentication module for POP/IMAP that will interface to Radius.

*If you like Lemsip, buy it.

Finally, Oliver of the CSC

Top 5 - 19th August AM Shift

Initial Diagnostics: We have seen a lot of customers this morning reporting a variety of broadband ailments which have required simple diagnostics as a first stage.

New Faults: Following basic diagnostics a small proportion of these customers were progressed onto the faults stage. There has been no specific pattern to this.

Many of the customers we have dealt with have been business customers.

Sales: We have seen quite a few calls trickle over into the sales overflow today, many of these have reported being advised to drop us a line by a friend.

Fault Updates: A few of our customers, once again predominantly business customers have called looking for a fault update. Some of these have called more than once to manage the fault through the process.

Hardware Configuration: With new routers being purchased and new customers receiving hardware we have guided quite a few of these through the basic steps of setting up and getting on line. This includes everything from giving basic server settings, confirming user names and passwords right through to guided set up of the d-link and voyager routers.

–
Remember! Check here tomorrow!

NBC Universal in the USA reports that 4.2 million watched the opening ceremony via their website, increasing to 7.8 million by Monday. It wouldn’t surprise me if even more were watching online by the start of the second week.

Below is a graph showing iPlayer traffic on our network since the opening ceremony. The opening ceremony saw around 600Mbps of bandwidth being used by iPlayer representing somewhere around 1,500 people watching just on Plusnet. On a normal day iPlayer traffic tends to peak around 300Mbps with a few spikes up towards 500Mbps when popular shows and events have been on (such as The Open and Doctor Who).

Today we are seeing over 950Mbps of bandwidth being used by iPlayer, how much of that is down to the new high quality stream is difficult to say, and some may well be catching up on last night’s Dragons’ Den, but we still estimate that around 2,000 of our customers are watching the Olympics right now.

Around lunchtime is also the most people time to watch the coverage, in the time I’ve been writing this blog the high point has gone first from 850Mbps to 900Mbps and now to 950Mbps. I may have to revise this figure to say 1Gbps before it goes live. This graph shows the last two hours (taken at 12:30pm). Note: the graphs show slightly different amounts because the sampling intervals are longer the longer the time period the graph shows, at two hours the sampling is done every 5 minutes.

We are though starting to see a real change, as the Olympics have gone on the number of people watching has increased, the peak on the bandwidth has increased and the length of time has stretched.

What’s probably happening is that people are telling their friends they’ve been watching the Olympics online while they are work and the great success of the British team is certainly helping people to enjoy the coverage.

It is interesting to note that the majority of the increase in iPlayer traffic is coming from business customers, this is largely evident with the times when the traffic is highest (roughly 9am to 5pm).

It would also be interesting to know how many of the people watching online are first time users of iPlayer and whether they will continue to use it once the Olympics have finished and how peoples’ ongoing behavior will change.

Dave Tomlinson

Plusnet Product Team

The PC Pro Awards have been around for a few years now. The results are compiled from the UK’s largest independent survey of IT customer satisfaction, so we’re always happy to be involved.

This year we’ve been shortlisted for Best ISP. Madasafish has made the shortlist too, so we’d like to give our congratulations to our colleagues over in South Africa.

The results will be announced later in the year and we’ll have our fingers crossed until then. Keep an eye on the Community Site to see if we win another award.

We have just found out that we have won “best small isp” in the top-10 broadband awards, aka the “broadband oscars”.

Top 10 Broadband wishes to give recognition to ISPs that have shown excellence in their provision of broadband in the UK. The small ISP award was open to all providers with less than 1 million customers, so we were up against stiff competition from the likes of Zen, O2 and Be.

Top10 Broadband’s Web Editor, Jessica McArdle said:

“Plusnet’s dedication to offering a mix of tailor-made home and gaming broadband packages and excellent customer services really impressed the judges. As a small ISP, Plusnet have the flexibility to offer a greater degree of bespoke service to their customers making them a key player in the UK broadband market.”

Check out the full details here: http://www.top10-broadband.co.uk/awards/2008/small_isp

Another one to add to the site then web team….

Today I’ve been looking for alternatives to Shindig: there aren’t any. You might think that would be a quick job but it’s much harder to establish the non-existence of something than the reverse. Elsewhere, Duffy & Andy have been battling problems. Nick and Mark have been updating documents, continuing with the brand refresh follow up work. Sam has been working on the graphic design for the new My Account. Kelly’s been in meetings all day while PJ’s had some catching-up to do after his hols. Dan has been working on some improvements to our intranet app, Workplace. Colin has been parsing XML. James made tea.

Martyn from Marketing:

Holidays and illness have struck the team today so we’re a bit thin on the ground. We’re carrying on regardless though. I’ve been blogging about our recent press coverage ( Link ) while also helping the web design guys create prototypes for some new pages. Amy’s been working on some campaign reporting and testing some emails. That leaves Sameer who tells me he’s been doing his usual web analysis and also that he’s beaten Gavin twice at pool. I think Gavin usually wins their pool battles, so it’s a big result for Sameer. See you tomorrow.

Paul from the CSC:

Another glorious summers day in Sheffield (less than an inch of rain) and we here on the special branch of customer services have been busy sampling goodies from South Africa which the boss lady brought us back after her time over there working (i.e. holiday). But back to work and we’ve all been busy making and receiving calls to and from our customers, offering the best advice and making sure they are on the best package they can be, whether it be for usage allowance or price.

As usual Sal has been dealing with our business customers and when not listening to fax lines does her best to offer the best advice possible. We have Damien having a two week secondment with ourselves as he normally works in a different department, this way he can learn the different processes that we deal with. We offer secondments to cross skill themselves and to aid their development.

Chris from Comms:

Today was another day, Monday actually.

Bob has been sending an email to some of our customers and was in a few meetings too. James has messaged me what he’s been doing, but I’m not going to read it and instead will say he’s been learning to fly. Matt’s been fighting a seemingly never ending battle against tasks and I’ve been dealing with a few faults, taking some calls and having the most jabber conversations ever in the history of the world.

That is all.

Well not quite.

Here’s some more.

And a bit more.

And here’s a link.

That really is all.

No really.

If you click the URL in the email, you’ll be taken to a website aiming to exploit this by putting a rogue URL in your clipboard, so next time you paste a link in and click ‘go’ you’ll be taken to a site advertising rogue anti-virus software.

More details available at the Beeb: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7567889.stm

Follow @trendingtopics to get the updates. There’s also an RSS feed if you’re interested. It’s a very low tech solution and it’s not guaranteed to work but it’s been running for about a week and I’ve already found it quite useful. Among other things, it was how I found out about President Musharaf’s resignation, Russia threatening to launch a nuclear attack on Poland, Russia invading Georgia and Twitter stopping SMS notifications in the UK.

How it works: I used Dapper to ’scrape’ search.twitter.com and output an RSS feed. I then tried to feed this into TwitterFeed but that didn’t work because TwitterFeed requires each RSS item to have a date or a GUID. So, in an effort to stay with the web mash-up spirit I tried to use Yahoo! Pipes to copy the <link> of each RSS item into the <guid>. I nearly got it working but in the end I gave up and just used a custom PHP script on my website to do it. If there’s demand I may improve the script to filter out very similar words (i.e. “Olympic” vs “Olympics”) and keep track of historical trends but in the meantime, try it out and let me know how you get on.

So, better late than never, here’s a look at what the press had to say about us last week.

The biggest news item was an IT Pro interview with our very own Neil Armstrong. It’s a good read, covering traffic management, the iPlayer, our relationship with BT and more.

I’m sure plenty of you have been gripped by the Olympics over the last few days. Web User published a story about the BBC’s online coverage of the Games and featured the surge in traffic that we saw during the opening ceremony.

Finally, Easier Finance picked up on our monthly contracts and recommended us as a good broadband provider for students.

Let us know if you spotted anything else in the press last week that mentioned Plusnet.

Anyway enough of the pre-amble, let’s get on with the business of the day.

Today we start off with Catherine from QA:

This morning started badly when I carried an over full coffee *so* carefully down two flights of stairs, only to jog my arm and spill some about two feet from my desk, and scald my finger to boot. Then, my headphones broke so there has been no widdly guitar to speed my testing along. What a day! Still, I’ve been learning how to use more of our mock services as part of ensuring our java upgrade goes well which has been really interesting. Gavin has been helping me with this as a bit of a break from his automation work - thanks Gav! Paul has been motoring on with his work on our products tool and learning about the wonderful world of billing. Nigel and Team Awesome are still working on Project Secret Squirrel and Gary has been preparing for another mixed bag of changes which will be rolling out on Monday morning. Have a great weekend, everyone

Next we have Ben from the CSC:

Today hasn’t been too far out of the ordinary with the usual mix for the top 5, so without further ado, here they are…

(1) Router setup
This one is never going to go away until we bring in TR-069! Customers are calling in at every stage of setting up their new hardware, from removing old connections from their computer and configuring DNS details to simply typing in the router’s configuration page into their browser of choice.

(2) New faults
The usual mix of faults have been reported today, intermittent synchronisation and speed taking the lead over authentication. The majority of these faults are resolved with good advice from a CSC Agent, with a minority being pushed through to the faults team to investigate further.

(3) Provisioning updates
Seven to ten days are just too many for our new customers, it seems like we can’t bring them over to Plusnet quick enough! With many new customers trying out broadband or the internet for the first time, they don’t have email or web access to check the progress of their order online, so this generates calls into the CSC.

(4) Fault updates
The number of reported faults is falling, and hence we’re seeing fault updates drop down in our list of call causes. Our SMS system has come into it’s own in keeping customers informed of the progress of their faults, but with only 180 characters to fit into an SMS, we often have to ask customers to call in for a full update.

(5) Username / password verification
There has been no pattern to the reasons behind people calling in for their usernames or passwords, but we have seen enough of these calls to warrant a top 5 position.

Speaking of faults, Adam’s got an update from our Faults Team:

I have mainly been dealing with Home Phone faults and Broadband Fault Escalations.
Keith has been hammering speed faults logged with BT for the entire day as well as ensuring certain faults don’t time out with BT.
Bradders has been slightly obsessed with the whiteboards, to ensure that we are keeping within the response times for all faults.
He has been doing some Retest tickets, and Manager Faults and ensuring we’ve been keeping the quality of service at a high standard.
Steve has been doing No Sync faults already logged with BT, so retesting, checking that the service is working.
Alex has been hammering speed faults and either raising or educating customer with the correct expectations of MaxDSL.
Tom has been dealing with dropping connection issues.
Rich and Pete have been dealing with Auth issues and No Sync issues raised with BT, and one of them will be lucky enough to calling back customers who we couldn’t get in touch with earlier.

The team in general have also been assisting colleagues who have customers calling for fault updates, as well as taking a few calls when it gets busy.

Over now to the Marketing desk and Martyn:

Today’s big news is the launch of a new My Referrals offer. Gavin and Chris have been working hard on this all week and hopefully some of you will be able to go and spread the word.

It’s been a mixed bag for the rest of us. Spencer has been sorting out stationery that uses the new Plusnet branding and I’ve been working on improvements to some of our sales pages. We’ve also been eating cake. Amy’s been on the phone to some of the comparison sites that we work with and Sameer’s spent the day looking into all sorts of web analytics reports. Shailini’s been in loads of meetings and she’s in one now so I can’t even tell you what they’ve been about.

That’s it for the week from us. Enjoy your weekend.

No poetry this week unfortunately, but instead a full end of week report from Jen in HR:

This week, HR have been….

Barbs has been sorting out stuff for people changing roles across the business…including me! She’s also been doing a bit of housekeeping in filestore of our HR documents. As usual, she’s been busy writing our HR reports, too. She’s been sorting out the admin for those staff leaving for pastures new over the next few weeks and organising the pension visit which took place earlier this week. All this on top of lots of bits of admin and managing to squeeze a day off in too!

Gemma has been helping me with the Master Cutler Challenge Raffle and finalising the Absence Workshop. She’s been busy sorting Employee Relations and helped Diane present Absence Analysis for July. She’s also been inputting new data onto our HR system for better reporting.

Diane spent the first day catching up from her holiday and then has been busy putting together the absence analysis and also carried out a review of 121s in the business, including creating a new pro forma.

Amanda presented our Operational Review to the Directors, going through all the exciting stuff we’ve delivered on in the past couple of months. She did mop up sessions for the 360° feedback, had meetings with BT HR and reviewed the lesson plan for the Absence workshops next week.

Meanwhile, I’ve been busy trying to plan for my move into the reception area downstairs, now that my role’s changed to HR Assistant. So, it’s all been picking out colours and deciding where the furniture’s going to go! (Ed: you sound like you’re moving in Jen!)
I’ve also been updating the Values presentation that we created in April and trying to sort out a stack of offsite, transport and accommodation bookings (including the Christmas party). I also managed to sneak off to Ladies’ day at Beverley races and lose more than I won….

Phew…all in a week’s work!

Lastly for today Bob brings us enlightenment from the Comms Team:

Hi, BÅB ‘the bed’ PYLLENBY from the almighty Comms Team here.

Today there’s just been the three of us because JÅMMES ‘the desk’ BJÄYLLI has been on leave.

MÅTRÄK ‘the chair’ TÅILLÅRD has been busy helping the CSC out with the logged faults ticket pools, and been reviewing development change controls.

SFRIS ‘the drawers’ PÄRR has also been tucking into ‘all things faults’ whilst casting his eye over the odd networks changes control.

I’ve mainly been concentrating on problems.

You’re probably wondering what on Earth has happened to our regular psudonyms? Well, you’ve only got the random link of the day to blame for that

Vi ses sénare.

Well that’s it for this week, it might even be a nice weekend. I’m hoping for some sunshine as I fancy either a trip to the seaside or a long bike ride… or both.

Have fun everyone.