Unable to connect - AGAIN!!!!!!

[#1]

Quote from: Bob

Open to suggestions on how you think we could have communicated it better? Your main cause for complaint seems to be that our Liveperson representatives aren't kept in the loop about service affecting outages? That's despite them not being trained to offer technical support per se.

And that is the problem Bob. They don't need to be technically trained (despite the window saying they're 'specialists') but they do need to be kept in the loop.
I can't believe a communications company doesn't grasp that very basic principle.
Does no-one apart from me see that as worrying?

[#2]

Quote from: okrzynska

Does no-one apart from me see that as worrying?

Do you believe that you have given PN enough time to circulate the information between when the problem showed itself to when you contacted PN?

[#3]

Quote from: Bob

You can browse to the version on our website directly by visiting http://status.plus.net

Ah, dead handy. My interenet connection went PFT at about half-past five - I live in Salisbury - and it hasn't come back since then. Nice to know that (a) it's BT's fault and (b) other people are without service as well. It might explain all those BT vans I saw earlier. Fortunately I have a dongle.
As for communicating with the customers, I used to do that kind of thing for a living on a support forum, although it wasn't an ISP. The trick is to not exhibit any personality at all, and just post short, to-the-point updates. Never engage in conversation, you'll just end up wasting time with the 14,000 post club. E.g. people who have "posts: 14000" next to their name. It's pointless trying to engage with them, and in any case they're addicted and will never leave no matter how much you abuse them.
But, yes. The internet. For the record this is the very first problem I've had with Plusnet in the year I've been with them, which is better than Demon but not as good as Pipex (but cheaper).

[#4]

Quote from: itsme

Quote from: okrzynska Does no-one apart from me see that as worrying? Do you believe that you have given PN enough time to circulate the information between when the problem showed itself to when you contacted PN?

More than enough yes.

[#5]

Quote from: AshleyPomeroy

As for communicating with the customers, I used to do that kind of thing for a living on a support forum, although it wasn't an ISP. The trick is to not exhibit any personality at all, and just post short, to-the-point updates. Never engage in conversation, you'll just end up wasting time with the 14,000 post club. E.g. people who have "posts: 14000" next to their name. It's pointless trying to engage with them, and in any case they're addicted and will never leave no matter how much you abuse them.

It's people like you who we as paying customers don't like hearing from. PN SHOULD communicate with us. Yes they're frustrating sometimes but its even more frustrating when they behave like you're advising them to.
And for the record.. people DO switch. I don't want to be with PN but the SO is reluctant to switch.

[#6]

Being rude etc will just get your heart rate up, Come back tomorrow and all will be well.

[#7]

Bizarre!
All those Microwave towers running from North of England to London designed to resist a nuclear strike and keep the country in touch and one fibre channel cut in Slough renders a large part of the country unable to use Broadband...
I would have thought that a 21st Century Network (for that is what 21CN stands for) would be designed with more redundancy and resilience especially given the low cost of fibre. To have a street digger in Slough render so much hassle doesn't instill confidence much 

[#8]

What would you suggest. When they say cable it will be a cable with multiple fibres, it could be more than one cable. Are you suggesting that they double every cable in the same underground ducting?

[#9]

I always used to think that the good thing about the internet was that the traffic could go down two different  - at least - routes between nodes

[#10]

Quote from: itsme

Are you suggesting that they double every cable in the same underground ducting?

I've seen it done with what was supposed to be a redundant power supply,  and when the digger found it it spliced both power cables rendering the backup systems more redundant than expected!
However,  as I mentioned earlier,  one of the primary problems for most people is that we're being directed to a single DNS server which is now unavailable.
It' doesn't much to locate a secondary DNS elsewhere so that the likelihood of both of them being taken out at the same time is slim.
I've now configured my computer to bypass my router and go to a PlusNet DNS server directly which works fine.
And just in case,  I've got an OpenDNS server in there to boot!

[#11]

The DNS IP of 62.6.38.125 belong to BT which is seen if a PPP connection is not established and you should have been given a BT IP address. The problem with the cut cable is that traffic is not routed to the nodes to established the PPP connection which is when you will get the IP and DNS settings from PN.

[#12]

Quote from: kmilburn

Looks like it more than just a BT wholesale problem.. My connection was down, and after rebooting the router it came back up, with DSL and Internet up, but I was unable to connect to anything from my computer. The problem I have now is that my connection has been given a DNS  server address which is not reachable  (62.6.38.125) After switching my machine to use 212.159.13.49 I'm able to connect without problems! And in classic redundancy measures,  the Primary and Secondary DNS servers are allocated to the same address...

Have you checked if you are connected to a Plusnet gateway? (I suspect not)

[#13]

Quote from: jelv

Have you checked if you are connected to a Plusnet gateway? (I suspect not)

I hadn't,  and according to it..

Quote

You are currently connected to the gateway known as thn-ag1. This is located in Telehouse North.

I'm not sure which part of the system assigns it,  but I've got my normal static IP address too.

[#14]

Quote from: ianknight99

... one fibre channel cut in Slough renders a large part of the country unable to use Broadband...

There's a bit of ambiguity about this at the moment, and I've been party to some conflicting information. It's probably best that we don't speculate too heavily about the cause at the moment until further information is forthcoming...

[#15]

Still, I am surprised about the number of single points of failure that BT always appear to have.  i.e. one outage at one exchange regularly (say once a year) seems to cut off great chunks of the country.  And I am amazed by this, I'm certain that BT must have some VERY clever network engineers on its payroll, and I'm certain that BT don't deliberately design networks with "one failure to fail them all and in the failure bind them" as a design goal, but they do seem to achieve "one failure to fail them all and in the failure bind them" with alarming consistency.