Even Pro service is slowing down

[#1]

Quote from: Barry

I had an interesting chat with the Comms (and ex Comms) team last night in their external briefing room. (Room TUN5) It does seem the issue has been identified, and is being sorted in phases, so as to not to disrupt the network all at once. B.

That's very encouraging, thank you. I don't suppose the cause of the issue could be given here for us mere mortals could it...? 

[#2]

You can add me to the list of people seeing absolute crap at peak times through PN too.
I am absolutely sick to the back teeth of playing this "lets try and find a gateway that gives me a half decent ping before I switch on my xbox" game.  I should be able to just switch on my xbox and play.  My ISP should just provide a service that works.  PN are forever inering around with settings trying to maximise the profitability yet again to the expense of the customers.  We went through this a couple of years ago if I remember, and here we are again.  More pipes lit yes, but only after some SERIOUS customer dissatisfaction and shoddy network capacity isses.  Now we find ourselves back again.  Waiting until the next round of tinkering goes ahead to try and give a quality service.
Im on PAYG, so should be getting all my traffic at line speed ALL the time.  What I see is an awful ping, awful speed - so I chase the rainbow of a quiet gateway, get maybe a couple of decent games before I get 100ms pings yet again and get booted out.  Then I have to do the whole merry dance all over again.
This is absolutely pathetic.
I couldnt give a toss about my defferd costs.  Having an ISP that can actually provide a decent gaming service is more important to me than the £40 or so quid Ill have to cough up to leave.  If its not sorted within the next week, Im off.  A customer for several years, in fact it must be aproaching a decade now.  Ive been there through previous bouts of shoddy service, and I had hoped PN had learnt the lessons, but it seems we are back at the profits ahead of service days yet again.
There are posts every single day where people are having to run around hopping gateways like headless chickens just to try and make their connection work properly.  It shouldnt matter which chuffing gateway you are on if the network actually worked properly.

[#3]

Here we go again - another few games drop out due to useless pings yet again - switch gateways and try again, everything fine for a while.  This is an absolute joke.

[#4]

Quote from: chesterfield

There are posts every single day where people are having to run around hopping gateways like headless chickens just to try and make their connection work properly.  It shouldnt matter which chuffing gateway you are on if the network actually worked properly.

Chesterfield
I absolutely agree. It should just work.  I really feel for the non tecchie customers out there, who would have absolutely no idea of how to log into their router, never mind Gateway hop.....  This really stinks of the issues last year around this time.....

Quote from: Barry

I had an interesting chat with the Comms (and ex Comms) team last night in their external briefing room. (Room TUN5) It does seem the issue has been identified, and is being sorted in phases, so as to not to disrupt the network all at once. B.

Barry....  It would be interesting, if of course you can, to detail the issues, and the proposed resolutions......

[#5]

I think you'll find this has something to do with it.

[#6]

Looks like we're officially under the 'Plan B' operation tonight and tomorrow, which is a shame because I was starting to see things improve over the last few days.
This seems to have dropped me back to a variable throughput of about 0.9 to 2.1MBits as opposed to my normal 2.4MBits continuous. Let's hope things return to normal after Monday night.

[#7]

Yes lets hope things go back to normal soon.

[#8]

The problem with one of our pipes (pcl-ag03) on Saturday, and the HD streaming of Top Gear and Doctor Who live didn't really help performance over the weekend.
I can assure you we are doing our utmost to resolve these issues, and it's not a case of us just not buying more bandwidth (we've bought more central capacity in the last 6 months than at any point whilst I've been here).

[#9]

I wonder what YouTube to support Full HD 1080p video will do to the network!

[#10]

From that link

Quote

The UK is 41st in the world in terms of download speeds, with an average of 5.27Mb/s, and 60th for upload speeds with an average of 0.7 Mb/s.

Makes you seriously question somebody's figures given that virtually no domestic non LLU customer will see more than half of that

[#11]

I don't know about anyone else but I'm fast losing patience with this, was on BBYW3 and moved to Pro as I was told it was given priority I can hardly get downloads going at all at the moment, very frustrating, the promises of fixes seem to be taking an age

[#12]

Yes i'm losing patience to, i've been with other isp's where they have had issues but they have never taken this long to fix. I thought the whole point of paying for pro was to get line speed all the time, so far i might as well have signed up to premium and been throttled in the evening because i seem to be throttled anyway.

[#13]

Guys, the problems with the network have been fairly major from what I've been led to believe, with some significant bits of kit appearing not to perform to spec. Keep upto date with what's being said on Service Status. I anticipate the wait won't be too much longer (from what Bob has said) and hopefully worthwhile, and IF I have to eat my words I'll be here saying so!

[#14]

But Chris, these problems have been with us for weeks.
Its one disaster after another. Its also one continuous series of promises that "we have identified a problem and will cure it later in the week". Then later in the week its a different problem that has raised its head to be the excuse of the moment.
Why do all of these problems "suddenly" occur - or were they there all the time but  nobody bothered to look for problems until all the customers started complaining.
We pay PlusNet to manage their network competently. They should have backups for potential disasters - not rely on running permanently on Plan B.
I am not interested if Strictly is on HD and is a problem for PlusNet. I do not pay them to make it a problem for me!!!.
I joined PlusNet because it was held in high esteem on many of the forums and provided a good, fast service. It looks like those days have gone.
Jim

[#15]

Quote from: EnglishMohican

Its one disaster after another. Its also one continuous series of promises that "we have identified a problem and will cure it later in the week". Then later in the week its a different problem that has raised its head to be the excuse of the moment.

We know that the problems have been with us a while and please believe me when I say we're doing all we can to fix them. What's made things difficult for us is the fact that there isn't really a single common cause. Instead we've found ourselves faced with a variety of underlying issues which together have contributed to the wider problem and made things pretty tricky to tackle. We've already done a lot of work but we're not out of the water yet (running on 'Plan B' is testament to that!). There's more work planned for the coming week and we'll keep you as up to date as we can via the Service Status feed.
One thing you might want to try is seeing if you have a 'Surf' icon here. If you do, click it and try activating it. The information on that page will say the purpose of the tool is to block P2P etc. but that's no longer the case following this work. Instead it your traffic will be sent via a different 'virtual router' on our network, it will require a disconnect/reconnect once activated though. It's not going to miraculously fix everybody's problems but some of you might find it makes a difference.