The Plusnet UserGroup recently celebrated its 5th birthday.

We have come a long way and achieved a lot in that time, especially since we are all volunteers with other commitments! (We'll post another blog soon with a nostalgic look at the early days and some highlights from the past 5 years.) Nevertheless we are not resting on our laurels, work is in hand behind the scenes to plan for the future. Some results from this are currently taking place - reconciling our forums.

When we started, each individual vISP (Force9, FreeOnline and Plusnet) had separate forums and our forums provided a meeting place for users from across these vISPs. This was particularly useful for discussing matters of a technical nature to gain access to wider expertise and some of this expertise was encapsulated in documents on our UserTools site.

In recent times, and no doubt spurred by our example, Plusnet have worked incredibly hard to create their vISP-independent "Community" site with its hugely popular forums (now incorporating Metronet & Madasafish customers too). We are pleased to say, these work very well enabling members to help each other. The Comms Team can also take credit for their amazing work at picking up support issues raised in the Community forums for customers whose 'tickets' have fallen through the cracks. In the past such issues were often raised with PUG to see if we could champion their case, whereas now the success from Community makes escalation to us unnecessary. This is a real sign of health within Plusnet and we applaud it! The PUG role now is more towards identifying problem trends and such matters are usually raised behind the scenes.

These trends meant that our forums offered too many choices for the current level and type of public traffic (we have much higher hidden traffic to facilitate our day to day dealings with Plusnet). So the first refinement to a new improved PUG is to present a friendlier face to those with questions and our existing public boards are being merged or archived with that aim.

This is just the tip of the iceberg though. Many discussions are taking place about how PUG will look and function in this coming year. Ideas are very welcome and you can get in touch by posting in our The PUG Place forum. We'd love to hear from you.

However bear with us during these changes, we think you will agree the new slimmer look is more welcoming! However if you disagree please let us know, we welcome constructive feedback.

Plusnet Achieves Continuous Availability of AAA Services with MySQL Cluster and FreeRADIUS

Plusnet has had some recent publicity in technology circles in a Case study published by MySQL / Sun.  The Case study covers the use of MySQL Cluster as the backend database to support the Authentication, Authorisation and Accounting services which are fundamental to ensuring secure and controlled access to the Network.

Plusnet upgraded their AAA (Authentication, Authorization, Accounting) platform to the FreeRADIUS server and MySQL Cluster database in order to address increased demands resulting from:

• rapid service proliferation over fixed and wireless networks
• a quickly growing user base
• The need for continuous network access and accounting demanded by more stringent SLAs

Since deployment a year ago the new MySQL Cluster and FreeRADIUS AAA platform has provided:

• Continuously available AAA services
• Accurate billing and revenue assurance by maintaining data integrity in real-time
• Accelerated time to market of new services with less cost and complexity due to built-in database redundancy and automated self-healing
• New levels of flexibility to scale RADIUS servers independently of their database
• Higher levels of infrastructure and management efficiency resulting from consolidation of multiple databases

.

The Usergroup offer their congratulations to Plusnet in gaining this recognition.

The full story including Network diagrams is available from the Case Study pages on the Sun MySQL site:  http://www.mysql.com/why-mysql/case-studies/mysql_cs_plusnet.php

uSwitch has recently published a survey of User satisfaction with support costs for calling a range of ISP's.  Plusnet does quite well in comparison with many of its peers

                                   Table 2

Provider	Technical support rating	Cost for average call	Average time on hold
AOL	52%	92p	6 minutes
BT	55%	Free	6 minutes
Orange	42%	90p	4 minutes
O2	75%	Free	2 minutes
Plusnet	70%	Free from Plusnet line 67p	5 minutes
Sky	60%	Free from Sky Talk line 89p from  BT line	6 minutes
TalkTalk	56%	Free	12 minutes
Tiscali	47%	91p from Tiscali line £1.75 from BT line	5 minutes
Virgin Media	56%	Free from Virgin line 67p from BT line	5 minutes
AVERAGE	55%	96p	6 minutes

Plusnet entry corrected by PUG to reflect recent change.

A precis of some of the notes in the survey:

Data sourced from a YouGov survey on behalf of uSwitch.com in February 2009. Sample size was 12,054 adults. The survey was carried out online.

Data is unweighted. Specific reporting of results published for suppliers that received 200 or more responses.

1. AOL, Orange, Plusnet and Tiscali customers have to pay to call broadband technical support lines. Based on company customers this adds up to at least 5.45 million customers. According to YouGov survey 38% of broadband customers have called their technical helpline over the last 12 months, an average of 2.89 times each. Applied to 5.45 million customers, this is 16 million calls. Average length of call to technical helplines is 17 minutes according to YouGov survey. Average cost of 96p per call calculated as per table 2. Customers are therefore paying £5,760,000 calling technical helplines each year.
2. 38% of broadband customers have called their technical helpline over the last 12 months and average of 2.89 times each. Based on 15 million broadband customers (Ofcom August 2008) this is 16.5 million calls.

For more complete information visit the uSwitch web site www.uswitch.com/news/communications/uswitch-broadband-customers-foot-the-bill-for-assistance-19410179/