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From Beijing to Birmingham - Eleanor Simmonds supports Plusnet

From Beijing to Birmingham - Eleanor Simmonds supports Plusnet

From Beijing to Birmingham - Eleanor Simmonds supports Plusnet

 

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1 For the last few Saturdays, Plusnet has had a rather impressive stand at the Bullring in Birmingham, as part of our recent marketing campaign.  We’ve been telling people all about our award-winning service, explaining what we do, and running competitions (come and see for yourself if you like – we’ll be there on the 17th and the 24th).

Last Saturday was extra special though, as we were joined by Eleanor Simmonds.  Eleanor was just 13 when she won her two gold medals at the 2008 Beijing Paralympics swimming events, bringing her instant fame at home.  Supporting us on Saturday, her bright and all-round lovely personality went down very well, and she was full of praise for what we do. 2 Among other things, Eleanor hosted a competition for shoppers to win a year’s free broadband - where players got stuck into an interactive motion sensor game (which is almost as fun to watch as play, as people get very enthusiastic). She had a lot of nice things to say about us too: “Plusnet are really thinking differently to help save their customers money and deliver great customer service. As with every teenager, I’m always online staying in touch with friends, and Plusnet allows me to do that easily.” Eleanor and one of our Plusnet staff have a go at playing If you haven’t been to our stand, we’ve still got two Saturdays left.  Even though Eleanor won’t be there this Saturday, we’d love you to come along.  Not only will you get to play for a year’s free broadband, but we’ll also have our experts on hand to answer your questions, discuss your feedback and explain exactly what we’re all about.  So, we hope to see you there, and we’ll be happy to help in any way we can!

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7 Comments
Be3G
Grafter
‘Plusnet are really thinking differently to help save their customers money and deliver great customer service. As with every teenager, I’m always online staying in touch with friends, and Plusnet allows me to do that easily.’ Ugh. It's so tawdry.
scootie1
Not applicable
am sick of seeing plusnet on the side of the 83 bus that passes my house every 10 mins. Just waiting for the day that a rep at a super market stops me and try's selling PN products to me. TT make over will be complete some of your bus stop adverts are very miss-leading and never have anything about the traffic management in the small print. you've been on this manchester campaign since at least January, cant imagine to think how much CBS outdoor is making from PN (bus company first groups advert company) tho it must be pulling the customers in if your still ongoing with campaign
muymalestado
Grafter
Don't quite know where the two above are coming from, I can say from tedious experience that PN staff are very good at customer facing communication, BUT from that experience I don't understand why such a technical service as broadband cannot become more automated in the small matter of finding and fixing faults. The toxic mix of providers needed to deliver PN broadband (or anyone's), and OffCom procedures, unacceptably lengthens the fault fixing process. So, yes PN is great, buy them, but woe if anything goes wrong.
NSavage
Newbie
muymalestado - from my time in the faults team, it is frustrating that more faults can't be automated, but the way that faults develop means a lot of the time what you see at your end is a symptom, not the cause (i.e. speed faults are often caused by your connection dropping regularly, even if it's only a second at a time). We avoid automation in a lot of instances because it tends not to fix it in the long term, and can get stuck in a loop. For example, the first thing that happens if you've got a dropping connection is that the speed automatically drops at the exchange to stabalise it. If faults were fully automated, the speed would drop, your line could become stable, this would be detected as 'fault fixed' and your speed would be increased, then the connection would start dropping again, then your speed would be reduced, then it would become stable........ and so on. For better or for worse, at the moment the world of faults needs to have manual intervention. Someone with an analytical mind will usually do a better job than automation. I'm sure in the long run this will be dealt with, but for now we have to do our best to get things fixed using the tools available. I hope that helps in some way. I know it doesn't speed up the faults process, but I thought you would like to know that it is something we've talked about on several occasions. It's also something that does matter to us - even though faults are not fully automated, we have dramatically increased the number of people in the faults team over the last three months. As those people become more and more experienced, we should see even more of an improvement.
scootie1
Not applicable
@muymalestado. am coming from the angle of when plusnet didnt do national adverts and just let word of mouth (refreals) and comparsion sites brin in the customershe PN network ran alot better as it was a steady trickle of customers. now as it stands they get a huge amount sign up in one go and SOMETIMES the bandwidth forecasters dont get it right and so to many cusomers to little bandwidth and they end up playing catch up
dave
Plusnet Help Team
asbo, a lot of time and effort goes in to our capacity forecasting, it has to because of some of the lead times involves in building out the network to the scale that is needed. At the of the last financial year we planned out our capacity requirements for the next year (and pencilled in the requirements for the next 4 years, a lot harder to go that far because of fibre for example) and brought in all the necessary hardware (Juniper routers, Arbor e30s, etc.) to support that growth. We lit another 155Mbps segment on 20CN this week which terminates on one of those new Junipers (PCL-AG05) and two others are already in service (replacement PTN-AG01 and PTN-AG02). Two pieces of maintenance work on 21CN done recently are also preparing the network to be able to support the 10Gbps host links we currently have on order which will replace the current 1Gbps links we have and all the 622 pipes for when we switch over to IPStream Connect. Before we get there we are continuing to grow the 20CN network with 622s, we've got 12 segments available to be lit at the moment across 4 622s and another 3 622s on order. On 21CN we have another 3.7Gbps of capacity waiting to be lit. We do not want to run the risk of ever being short of capacity we can light. We monitor the performance of the network daily to see what the network utilisation is like, monitor demand and performance and redraw our forecast based on the number of customers there are how much they are demanding each week so that we are working ahead of the game and lighting capacity before we get to the point that customers will see any impact on performance. Any big increases in signups from advertising is factored in to the capacity forecast and feeds through, if the numbers are higher then we can uplift that capacity as those customers' activation dates go through, that's how closely we monitor things. Since the beginning of February we've lit 12 segments on 20CN and 1.1Gbps on 21CN and there's plenty more to come yet.
Ellis
Grafter
Hi, Dave Having worked in Exchange Traffic Planning for 10 years back in the 1970-80's, I can appreciate the complexities of modern telecommunications (although the equipment used now is way ahead of our time). We were involved in the first digital exchange (Arrington, Cambridgeshire) when we had to keep the old strowger exchange running as back-up. We had our Annual Traffic Division Re-union last Saturday, we're getting fewer now (some have died, some have left the area). It was nice to discuss some of the incidents in our time. Ellis.