The Official PlusNet UserGroup

PlusNet Open Day 2008

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 22:04:23 +0100

PlusNet Open Day

PlusNet have announced the date of their 2008 Open Day as Friday 25 April.

If it's anything like the one last year it will be well worth attending:

Meet the staff
Technical presentations
Future products
Q & A Sessions..... and more - the opportunity to put faces to many of the names who seldom appear in the forums.

Generally a very good day. There are not many companies that will have senior staff ready to mingle with visitors and gave straight answers to questions posed from the floor.

Some PUG members will be present to answer your questions on what we represent.

Sadly space is limited and only 30 lucky people get to make the visit - fill in the survey here to ensure your place at the event.

New Coordination Team Appointed

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 23:20:31 +0000

Using the more agile procedures in the new Rules of Association approved on Monday evening the Full Members have completed appointment of the first Coordination Team. This consists of the following 7 members:

biondani
bud
dhookham
Liam
MauriceB (Chairperson)
pjmarsh
spraxyt

What Happens next?

The primary objective of the Coordination Team is to provide effective organisation of UserGroup activities. With freshly charged batteries the first challenge for the newly appointed team is to focus on the way ahead.

Suggestions from all UserGroup members are welcome at any time. Please post these in The PUG Place forum. Note that Contact Us is currently disabled since spammers have targeted this in furtherance of their activities.

PUG adopts new Rules of Association

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 23:35:42 +0000

At an Extraordinary General Meeting held on 17/03/2008 (minutes) PUG unanimously adopted new Rules of Association (link) to replace its previous Constitution which was good in parts but inappropriately bureaucratic and unworkable in others. The structure of the UserGroup was also unclear, particularly to new members.

The new Rules (as a draft) were made available for comment here at the end of last month and the draft modified as a result of the feedback received - PUG are grateful for that feedback. An updated FAQ (here) accompanies the new Rules.

The next stage

The process to appoint the first Coordination Team under the new Rules is underway. The new Rules allow a more pragmatic and flexible means of accomplishing things and the appointment process is expected to be completed by next weekend.

For information - an up-to-date list of PUG members can be found here. This link, as well as those to the Rules and FAQ can be found under 'About Us' on the left hand Navigation menu.

PlusNet Triumph at the uSwitch Awards

Mon, 17 Mar 2008 21:30:23 +0000

The glue is scarcely dry on the last bit of shelving, but it looks like PlusNet will need an entire cupboard for the latest set of awards.

uSwitch, the comparison site announce the winners of their latest broadband awards today, and of the 11 awards up for grabs, PlusNet have won an impressive total of 9.

The categories were:

Best overall customer satisfaction
Most likely to be recommended
Best customer service
Best technical support
Best quality of connection
Best for speed satisfaction
Best for ease of use
Best for setup support
Best value for money (joint with Sky)

This is the third set of awards in as many months in which PlusNet have triumphed and signals a return to the standards for which they were once renowned.

Gaining all these awards is not without problems though - the cabinet is now full!

PlusNet Named Best Consumer ISP at ISPA Awards

Fri, 14 Mar 2008 23:56:06 +0000

Breaking news

Following on from their success at the Broadband Choice Awards it seems that PlusNet haven't been resting on their laurels, and have been named as Best Consumer ISP at tonight's ISPA Awards ceremony at the Grosvenor Square Marriott.

In a contrast to many long-winded Oscar acceptance speeches, Neil Armstrong accepted the award with the words "We’re back".

Good thing there's a sale on at IKEA next month... you're going to need a bigger cupboard!

2008 looks like being PlusNet's renaissance - keep it up, guys!

Plusnet wins award as best ISP

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 16:08:33 +0000

PlusNet has been rated as Top ISP in a review conducted by broadband comparison service, Broadband Choices.

The UK's leading ten broadband providers were tested in six categories: quality and reliability, download time, clarity of billing and pricing, after sales support, value for money and speed of service activation.

PlusNet topped the table with an average of 79% of users saying they were satisfied with their broadband service across all six categories.

Folowing on from the awards won during 2007 this is good news to start off 2008

See the full text here

February PUGIT Top 5 Items Close to Closure

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 15:41:18 +0000

In his recent online Roadmap blog Pete Jackson introduced a number of changes to the way the teams are structured and their key responsibilities. The items of relevance to this post are the creation of a specific role in addressing items on the NADS¹ and PUGIT² problems lists. Behind the scenes PUG has been pushing for there to be some focus on clearing the growing list of issues in the PUGIT database, so this was a very welcome piece of news.

To get the process moving PUG created a February Top 5 list of items which were considered to be of value to both the business and users, with an additional emphasis on being achievable. This list was:

PUGIT Issue 116 Default rDNS format - ip.plus.com NOT username.plus.com
PUGIT Issue 27 PDF Invoice Sent by Email
PUGIT Issue 60 14 day inactivity message has been removed from My Questions
PUGIT Issue 40, PUGIT Issue 193, PUGIT Issue 278. All to do with ticket handling

The eagle eyed reader will spot that there are 6 items - the author could write but was less good at counting

So what progress?

Really great news - all of the Ticket / Question issues have been tested and are looking to roll to the live platform later this week.

PUGIT 27 is being worked on but will need some further integration.

Item 116 is being reviewed for inclusion in longer term development plans. We will continue to monitor progress.

LATE EDIT: The planned roll-out occurred on Thursday 6/03/2008 - so get testing that things are as you would expect!

And what next?

Because of the timescales PUG will again feed a Top 5 list to PlusNet for action during March. Then it is planned to generate a new Topic / Poll on the Community site so that all Community users will have the opportunity to select the Items to be included in the April Top 5. More details on this when we finalise the options on achieving a good result.

¹ NADS Nickel and Dime Solutions - Simple to do but need time allocating

² PUGIT A database of identified issues / problems - jointly maintained by PUG and PlusNet

OFCOM tackles Telecomm Direct Debit charges

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 23:58:12 +0000

Quote from OFCOM

At Ofcom, we believe that healthy competition is the best way to make sure consumers enjoy the benefit of new services and lower prices. If, for example, you have a phone at home, a mobile, broadband or pay TV, you’ll have seen their prices fall over recent years.

However, the main price you pay isn’t always the only price you pay. Sometimes, extra charges come into play, for a variety of reasons. Examples include:

if you choose to pay by cash or cheque, rather than using a Direct Debit from your bank (“non-direct debit charges”);
if you want a fully itemised bill, not just a summary;
if you pay late, or if your payment doesn’t go through (e.g. if your cheque bounces);
if you cancel a contract before the minimum period is up;
if you cancel a service even after the minimum period is up; or
if you stop taking a service, but still have to pay until the end of a notice period.

At Ofcom we’ve received many complaints about these small-print charges. A lot of these complaints have been about non-direct debit charges. We’ve had a lot of letters from MPs about this, and there have been a number of newspaper articles. However, we’ve also had complaints about other extra charges. In the last six months we’ve had almost as many complaints about charges when you cancel your contract early. We’ve had complaints about a number of different companies.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that firms are doing anything wrong, but it’s our job to make sure that companies play fair, and that ordinary customers know what to look out for.

We’ve also heard worries that these extra charges hit people with the lowest incomes. For example, they may not have a bank account and then have to pay more because they can’t set up a Direct Debit.

OpenID receives heavyweight backing

Wed, 13 Feb 2008 11:40:07 +0000

Article from PC Pro 7th February 2008

Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo have joined the board of the OpenID Foundation, as the single sign-in scheme gathers momentum.

OpenID is a digital management standard that allows web users to register a single username and password that can then be used with any website that supports the system. The OpenID Foundation was created to promote the standard.

"There is little doubt that the success of OpenID will be tied to the quality of the user experience it brings to millions of consumers," says Nico Popp, the vice president of innovation at VeriSign.

"The Foundation will take it further and enable a true 'one-click' or even 'zero-click' user experience for login, registration, payment and all other forms of internet activities. The Foundation will be the place to funnel the best ideas from the community and set the best deployment practices."

The scheme received a boost last month when it was announced that anybody with a Yahoo ID would be able to use it on OpenID supported sites, tripling its userbase at a stroke.

Stuart Turton

This adds new impetus to the background work being done by the PlusNet team in their blog.

New Broadband aggregation product

Fri, 08 Feb 2008 12:55:09 +0000

A much reduced quote from El Reg today Click on the link for the full article.

Sex, money and chocolate are supposed to be the three things you can't have too much of. There is a fourth: Bandwidth. One way to have twice as much bandwidth is to have two lines, but getting them to work together isn't simple. Sharedband, a spin-off from BT Martlesham, is poised to launch a UK service to do just this.

An ugly truth about broadband is that the speed you get falls far short of what's advertised. But while complaining might change the ISPs advertising, it won't change the physics. In the past, networks have relied on everyone being so happy with the upgrade that it didn’t matter what the true speed actually was. If you went from dial-up with a rated 56kbps (in reality usually closer to 30kbps) to 512kbps (in reality 300kbps) and "always on", it was such an improvement it seemed churlish to complain. So the claim "up to 24Mb/s" really means 15Mb/s on a good day. Five means three, and three means one.

So what's a speed-hungry surfer to do?

Well, if you are dedicated then you can tweak the performance. Try disabling the ring circuit on the phone line, make sure you have filters in all the right places, and run a diagnostic tool like DMT.

The solution adopted by Sharedband is not to aggregate the channels in the PC but in the router. Sharedband has code which runs in the best selling ADSL routers which gives one router control over the other. This manages the biggest problem, which is skew between the two lines. There are limitations: there's a limit to the speed of lines which can be aggregated, and the processors in the routers might not be able cope with two 24Mb/s lines. For those applications Sharedband is investigating a PC-based solution.

At a demonstration in their Ipswich office - with the poetic postcode of IP4 - the start-up showed downloads of between one and a half and close to two times the single line speed. It was also fault-tolerant: one router could be unplugged and although of course the speed dropped correspondingly, the download continued. The resilience is improved if you use two ISPs, ideally through two different exchanges, although this might be hard to arrange. There is no need to have both lines through the same ISP - indeed Sharedband recommend that you don't.

Sharedband is concentrating on wholesale deals and already has reseller agreements with BT Wholesale and Netgear.

Trial installations have shown that it's the increase in upload speed which is often most attractive. An installation at Mallory Park race circuit for the British Superbike Grand Prix allowed the attending journalists to upload stories and pictures at three times the speed they had the previous year. As a robust, high-speed solution Sharedband is concentrating on the small business market, but it might also be just the thing for the dedicated surfer, or enthusiastic home user.

Sharedband says it will go live in the next few weeks - the company's FAQ is here.

NOTE: One intrepid PUG member has been involved in an early trial of the product - with interesting results. But, more on that later!.