This is quite an interesting post. I think that it mostly comes down to how much value you put on your broadband connection. And that is something you really have to think hard about. It's easy to assume that broadband is all the same... but really that couldn't be further from the truth.
Working in this industry, I absolutely know how expensive broadband is to deliver. Usage is growing, consumer pricing is coming down - and wholesale costs aren't really budging in line with this.
Every broadband provider in this land has to buy bandwidth and pay port-costs for getting customers online - and in this country bandwidth is not cheap. Whether it's from BT as Central Capacity, or whether it's an LLU provider purchasing backhaul from a wholesaler.
With this knowledge in mind, I know that free broadband simply cannot be delivered without a massive subsidy from elsewhere, huge investment and cut-backs in other areas. I am quite happy to say that companies who offer free broadband - are losing money on broadband. How long can they sustain the loss, though? How long can they continue to invest while losing money? How long can they continue to cross-subsidise before the revenue dries up? I think it’s a ticking time-bomb.
But, enough about the economics - it's also about quality of service. Can free broadband really be a quality service? This quote, in response to TalkTalk’s poor show in uSwitch’s survey results (which, by the way, we won ) The Reg had this to say (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/03/uswitch_survey/) :
"When it became first to offer "free" service, TalkTalk promised it would change broadband forever. On this evidence, let's hope not.”It's not just about getting the customer online and providing them with a connection. It's about the quality and speed of the connection. It's about how you support these customers when it goes wrong or they need help. It's about providing them with an email service that works.
The connection is only part of the service - but it's all the other bits that make up the full package.
Here are just some of the reasons why I believe PlusNet is the right choice :
- Highly Skilled Support Staff- - We always try to ensure that the knowledge within our Support Centre is as spread as possible. Our analysts are continually trained and developed to a defined skills matrix. We don’t operate a usual call-centre setup where you could be passed between 2nd and 3rd line agents.
- Sheffield Based Support- - All our support staff are sat right here in our Sheffield office. We’ve not outsourced our support overseas to cut costs and we have no plans to do so. If you call us, you will always speak to someone in this country.
- Geographical Support Number, if it helps- - We’ve introduced a Sheffield 0114 support number to benefit customers who get an inclusive call bundle (such as those using our Home Phone service) and customers calling on their mobile phones.
- One Office, One Team- - From our CEO down, we’re all based in one building. It allows us to be a lot more ‘joined up’ in our approach and be a lot more agile in our development. It means the people that deal with our customers can feedback straight into the business. Any network problems which may occur from time to time are quickly responded to by our networks team within this building - rather than having a networks team based in a different part of the world.
- Community Approach- - We interact with our customers online through communities and forums, taking onboard feedback from customers and influencing our developments internally based on this feedback.
- Monthly Contract Products- - The free providers will tie you in to a lengthy contract and charge you large cancellation fees to move. All our products are based on monthly contracts, which gives our customers the flexibility they need. It’s also because we’re confident that we provide a good service. With the free providers, if they’re not up to scratch – you’re tied to them. We don’t hold customers hostage like that, and that means that we’re always striving to provide the best service possible.
- Clearly defined usage and traffic management policies- - We know that broadband networks have to be carefully managed to ensure that customers get a decent quality of service at all times. Because of the economics mentioned above, it’s just not possible to throw expensive bandwidth at the network willy-nilly. We budget a certain amount of bandwidth into the design of each of our products, and then we consistently ensure that we are providing enough to meet, or exceed, this design.
With this bandwidth, we then have to ensure that interactive and latency-sensitive applications always run at as fast a speed as possible. We prioritise Gaming and VoIP traffic on our network, for example, to ensure that Gamers get the best experience in the industry and VoIP calls are crystal clear with no dropouts or fluctuations in sound quality.
We fairly distribute our available bandwidth between and ensure that customers who wish to download large amounts via P2P or Usenet at the busiest times do not affect performance for the majority of our customers.
- Open and honest policies- - We have an ethos of being completely transparent and open and honest with our customers. We publish more about how we design our products and manage our network than all the other ISPs in this country put together! In addition, we have areas on our Portal where you can see our currently open Priority 1 problems (http://www.plus.net/support/service/problems/index.php?supporta=priorityproblems) we regularly update our service status pages (http://status.plus.net) and, more recently, we’ve been adding internal policies to our Portal so that customers understand exactly how we will react in certain situations (http://www.plus.net/support/service/policies/overview.shtml?supporta=policies).
We even publish our call stats on the Portal so customers can see exactly how we’re performing on incoming calls and customer query responses :
http://csc.plus.net - Referrals Programme- - We reward customers who recommend our service to their friends and family. Our business was built by word-of mouth referral by customers who enjoy our service. We don’t spend thousands on TV adverts; instead we reward customers who recommend our services with monthly discounts on their own service – as well as special offers such as our current Referrals Promotion where customers can earn upto £25 cash for each successful recommendation.
- Bob Pullen- - Bob is a legend – and he works for PlusNet!
- Comms Cat- - You can always be sure that the Comms Cat is monitoring the network :
http://community.plus.net/trafficmanagement/files/2007/06/commscat2.jpg Well - that was a long post!
