Update to DSLMax Upgrade Scheme

DSLMax Upgrade Programme Update

Summary:

- We’ve worked hard with BT to reduce Max DSL fault rates during June & July
- We are now going to restart our programme to upgrade customers to up-to 8Mb speeds
- We’ll do this for customers who have opted in first. More details below

Details:

As many of you will be aware, on July 3rd, we announced that we were freezing our upto 8meg broadband speed upgrades. The announcement regarding this can be found here:

http://usertools.plus.net/status/archive/1151939246.htm

Since we took the decision to freeze our upgrade scheme, we have been working closely with BT to try and understand why we were seeing quite so many faults being raised. We were seeing approximately 10% of our 60,000 upgraded customers, raising a broadband fault of some description.

One of the things that BT have helped us to identify is that a number of ISPs who were seeing a lower proportion of faults than us, were using a feature called “Interleaving”. Interleaving basically improves the stability on a line, and prevents a line from suffering “drop outs.” We were not applying interleaving by default to our 8meg services. For our customers that have raised a speed or connection fault, we have started to apply interleaving as part of the fault investigation. We are confident that this has dramatically reduced the number of faults that our customers are experiencing, and will continue to do so.

Along with the changes we have been making with regards to interleaving, there have also been a number of other developments. BT are continuing to make improvements to their Dynamic Line Management (DLM) system, which profiles lines speeds accordingly with regard to the quality of signal that they are receiving from the exchange. They have also been trialling a new version of the BT Speedtester, which the PlusNet Usergroup have been testing and providing valuable feedback. This new Speedtester helps to give the customer a more accurate expectation as to the speeds that they should be experiencing. We have also been making a number of changes to our support pages, to help everyone get a better understanding of how DSLMax works and things you can try to improve your experience of the service.

There’s even a video that BT have supplied, which you can find here:

http://portal.plus.net/support/videohelp/dslmaxv4.wmv

During this period, we have been advising our customers that would like to gain these higher speeds, to visit http://max.plus.net to request that an upgrade is done as soon as possible. We’re now happy to announce that we will be restarting our upgrade scheme on Monday, August 21st, at which stage we will be submitting 1,000 orders a week to BT, upgrading our customers that have “opted-in” via this method.

One common question that will undoubtedly arise will be, “Why are you only going to be placing 1,000 orders a week?” We want to be able to closely monitor how well the upgrades are performing once the orders have been completed. At this time we will be limiting the number of orders to this level and provided that we do not experience any considerable problems, we will be looking at increasing the number of orders we will be placing. We currently have received 15,000 opt in requests.

We will continue to provide our customers with updates regarding how well our upgrade scheme is performing in due course. As we will initially be focusing on our customers that have requested an upgrade, please feel free to request yours by visiting http://max.plus.net

We are aware that a number of our customers have been waiting a considerable period of time for their upgrades, and we would like to thank them for their ongoing patience during this time.