Soapbox time again...

[#1]

I am on my soapbox yet again!
Why is it still so difficult for PN to describe their different service offerings adequately?
My latest gripe is that within the business products sector, PN does not mention that both Teleworker and Small Business are apparently provisioned using BT Residential IPStream Max (which has a lower traffic priority within BT than Max Premier); the only hint is that ‘Business’ but not the other two has an 832kb/s upload.
My ‘even more latest’ gripe is that PN have now muddied the waters by offering a residential Pro account for gamers, when Pro was, until not too long ago, apparently the suffix for accounts provisioned off IPStream Max Premium (and its predecessor IPStream Office 2K). And – confuse confuse further – PN uses ‘Premier’ for non PAYG accounts. 
PN are naturally very close to their own product terminology; real users are less so. Could I suggest PN invite a cross-section panel of users to clarify PN’s product naming and feature descriptions? Or is it just me (not unlikely!) who finds all this confusing? 

[#2]

Theres no such thing as a BT Business / Residential IPStream product any more.  IPStream Home and IPStream Office have been replaced by Max and Max Premium. 
ISPs can use whichever product they like for whoever the EU is.
Most customers don't know what IPStream is, so it's only the PlusNet descriptions they go by.  All the Biz products tell you what the upload speed is, and if you choose "Business" then it shows you get the faster upload.
There has been Teleworker / Homeworker Pro which are legacy products provided on Max Premium (and formerly IPStream Office).
I personally think Broadband Your Way is fairly self explanatory and, as for Broadband Premier - that again is a product no longer sold by PlusNet and was called that way before BT even announced Max or Max Premium.

[#3]

Thank you Liam.
Let's take a concrete example: could you kindly point me to the place where PN states that Business accounts have a greater download traffic priority over the BT leg than Small Business or Teleworker? Which, as I understand it, it does and they don't.
And as regards product differentiation and upgrades (yet another of my gripes), the only published upgrade path from Teleworker Pro (for someone like me who has a Teleworker Pro account and who wants just a teeny bit more webspace or website traffic) is to full-blown 'Business' at nearly double the price. None too clever considering that the network provisioning (network cost to PN) is exactly the same.
To quote from one of my previous soapbox harangues*
"I want to be on capacity-based charging and not encounter sudden discontinuities in the price card ("you want more than 100MB webspace? you need to be on a different product"; wrong – I want to move smoothly up and down a cost curve for each major element of capacity I use). If I were [PN], I would be leaning on my resident ACMA to ensure that these curves directly reflected the total variable and fixed (not marginal variable) costs of providing this capacity."

* https://portal.plus.net/central/forums/viewtopic.php?t=49002

[#4]

Hi Decomplexity,
The problem that you have initially is that you're comparing a legacy product to an existing one.  It is indeed true that the legacy Teleworker Pro is on IPStream Max Premium, which costs us roughly £5 more per month to supply than IPStream Max, but obviously that is immaterial regarding your query. Teleworker and Small Business are provisioned over IPStream Max and not IPStream Max Premium.
As I've mentioned previously in response to one of your posts, we are aware that our Business product pages need work and this is something that we are currently working on as we want them to be a explanatory as the residential ones, which imho are excellent.
I also appreciate that you have an issue with the naming of our products.  This is unfortunate as Premier was introduced considerably before IPStream Max Premium and again, Premier is a legacy product and not for sale.  Regarding Pro, I don't really see what the issue is here, the website is clear in what this offers.
Regarding Pro, this is a residential account that offers the 5* performance that we have been planning.  for residential users who are happy to pay for full prioritisation on our Network. Our Business products do offer similar for non P2P based applications, but these are product aimed at businesses rather than residential customers.
I do accept your point regarding premier/premium, but I don't think this is an issue now as Broadband Premier is no longer for sale.

[#5]

Thanks James.
I am, incidentally, not knocking the BBYW concept as it reduces the rigid segmentation (silo'ing) of your products.
There is a one clear place for segmentation: when the underlying infrastructure is different in kind (e.g. with IPStream Max Premium, or when 'business' webspace need to be provisioned on servers with higher fault tolerance, or even with CSC calls handled by a different 'priority' team). But when the infrastructure is different in degree, e.g. more disk space, more Internet traffic throughput, more web space - subject to some reasonable maxima - then I firmly believe that PN's products should not be segmented.
This is not to say that PN should not offer named 'packages' for the less experienced user: it definitely should, but these packages should be put together at particular points on the spectrum of of non-segmented services and their price should be exactly that which a more experienced user would be charged if they put together a BBYW-like service with those components.
Were PN to sells services in this way, it makes adjusting prices in line with costs a trivial exercise. It also allows users to increase usage (as PAYG customers can do now on Internet traffic volume, but only on traffic volume and not other service features) without either getting warning letters or needing - as I do - to undertake a major cost jump to a new product.
Ah ha....but does this attract potential customers on whom PN loses money? ("Great; if 1GB traffic costs £1, then my 3000GB P2P will cost...."). No problem: PN uses non-linear price curves to penalise usage which is over-costly to provide.
</soapbox>
 

 

[#6]

I am struggling to work out how PN decides how to price the business range. If for example you compare Teleworker with BBYW2, TW appears inferior in lots of ways. There is only 2GB/month of inclusive usage instead of 8MB, only 100MB of webspace instead of 250GB, only 3 hosted domains instead of 5 etc. Yet Teleworker costs more than BBYW2.
What is better about Teleworker for the extra cost? Is is actually based on a superior wholesale product? I can't see any speed advantage since I only ever get about 1.5Mb/s where I am. Will I see a better upload speed or will that also be limited by the distance to the exchange? Will I get better traffic prioritisation, and if so why?
Why is the step up from TW to small business in terms of cost? Why is there not something in between?

[#7]

Hi there,
With Teleworker, you are entitled to Business Support.  I can't sing their praises enough, because they do a brilliant job.  To offer you some statistics, yesterday:
- 100% tickets answered within 4 hours.
- 100% calls answered within 60 seconds.
- 93% home phone calls answered within 60 seconds.
- Average wait time 15s.
- Average home phone wait time 6s.
It is a definite bonus add for the service, hence why it is priced higher.

[#8]

Is this the main difference? Is it provisioned on the same wholesale product as BBYW?
Are there any plans to increase the amount of included usage (as recently happened with BBYW) or the number of hosted domains? It seems the residential products got a facelift and the business ones missed out.

[#9]

The currently Teleworker product is provisioned on IPStream Max, but with varying differences to the traffic management policies than on BBYW.
There are currently no plans to increase the amount of usage include on our Business PAYG products.