Since then we’ve revamped our products, have officially launched ‘Up to 20Mbps’ and been busy in the background moving customers across to BT Wholesale’s 21CN network. Because of this, we’ve focussed more on making sure we’ve enough bandwidth to cope with the increased numbers on the 21CN platform. It’s for this reason that you might have seen one of the many announcements recently about us increasing the capacity on our 21CN host links.

Well, if you haven’t got ADSL2+ in your area (you can check here), then you needn’t worry as we’ve not forgotten about you – oh no siree!

Yesterday we lit almost a *full* 622Mbps central pipe for customers still on the 20CN network. This basically means that there’s now more bandwidth to be shared amongst everybody on ‘Up to 8Mb’ 20CN platform.

In the past, we’ve typically only lit one segment at a time (there are four segments per 622Mbps pipe). On this occasion though, we’ve gone the whole shebang and lit the lot!… Well almost the lot, we have had a bit of a problem getting one of the LTS’s online (There are three LTS’s per segment), but we expect that to be sorted shortly.

Customers connecting to the new segment will see their traffic routed through the gateway known as pcl-ag02.

NB: It’s worth noting the gateway checker might not work for some customers connecting to the new pipe, we’re looking into this as per the forum post here.

We’ve activated this bandwidth to accommodate the expected increase in customer numbers over the coming months, and the almost guaranteed increase in average usage as the year progresses. Also worth a mention is the fact that the Olympic Winter Games start this week and a lot of people are likely to be watching online.

When new capacity is added to the network, it takes time for it to balance and for a representative proportion of the customer base to connect to the new segments. In order to speed up this process we might need to briefly disconnect some broadband customers from the Internet. If we decide to do this then we’ll announce further details as a planned maintenance notice nearer the time.

Some of the more astute of you may be asking what happened to Plusnet 16 that was mentioned in the last capacity increase announcement? It’s nothing to worry about, it’s just that there were some unforeseen delays which resulted in Plusnet 17 being commissioned first (we ordered both at roughly the same time).

On a similarly related note, we’ve just upped the available bandwidth on the 21CN platform as well!

foursquare

FourSquare is a mobile application that is getting a lot of buzz at the moment. The basic premise of the service is to use the application to ‘check in’ when you are at restaurants / pubs / shops etc and share this information with your friends Facebook / Twitter. The application is clever as it looks up where you are using the technology in your Smartphone (GPS / Wi-Fi triangulation) and will give you a list of nearby locations to choose from. Once you have ‘checked in’ to a location you can see who else has visited there recently and be pushed location specific offers.

There is a strong gaming component to this application with badges awarded to users for completing tasks and letting users compete to be the ‘Mayor’ of a specific location through the number of ‘Check Ins’ a user has completed. You can use this application if you have an iPhone / Android / Blackberry / Palm Smartphone with support for more mobile operating systems expected in the future.

Click through on this link and let us know if you think this is a valuable application – the aim of these weekly blogs is to share with you what we think are the hot applications and services and see what you think. Also please use the Facebook & Twitter retweet buttons on the post to share this further.

James

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We start off today with Sanjiv from the Tech team:

Hellos,

Yet another bright and sunny day in Durban, summer’s almost ended, but the sun just won’t go away. In fact it’s being quite stubborn; weather man’s saying that Feb and March is going to be just as humid. Best time to catch some waves and pipes.

Big Ups to James Nelson for his contribution in training the CS and TS staff. He probably feels like a broken “A record”, from all that email and domain training. When not in training, his helping us to identify training and development needs, from QoS reviews. Thanks JN, spot one buddy, thanks for all the assistance, we know that you will miss us when you jet off.

Statistically, it’s been a busy week. Staffing hasn’t been the best and tackling 1200 tickets between CS and TS was rather challenging. Call contacts spiked as well, the week’s not over just yet and we’ve already topped 11k, in volumes to the support centre. John Lewis customers seem happier with our performances on call and tickets, satisfaction results took a comfortable upward change in direction. We hope to assimilate the fixes from here and hopefully put them in practice with Madasafish. With 1 in every 4 customer slight dissatisfied, that’s back to the drawing board for quick remedial action. We are quite optimistic however, that we can turn this around.

From the Technical corner, we are hoping to see a reduction in calls relating to the TR69 programme. Dev’s just got some work done and we looking forward to error free connections. Did you know that the guys who make our T routers, make the sky set top boxes? Ah.. who would have guessed.. Nick’s coming back to SA on Valentines Day; hope he brings chocs.

Tata, have a nice weekend !!

Thanks
Sanjiv

We’re also joined today by Kate from Finance:

Greetings from Finance.

This week we celebrated Plusnet’s 13th Birthday with cakes and bubbly. You’ll be pleased to know we didn’t throw any tantrums, slam any doors or drastically change our fashion sense, in the typical teenage way.
We have crunched an awful lot of number this week, oh yes, our financial jaws are well and truly aching. It’s been month end time, which means all hands on deck to get everything in order and reported on time.
On the social side, Fiona has been preparing to make blueberry muffins. She says she will let us know how they turn out – I’m hoping for more than that, bring some in to the office Fiona!
On the subject of food, I made an awesome Lamb Rogan Josh this week – recipe here Link (use the instructions rather than the video).
Mark is going to watch the rugby in 3D tomorrow, which should be interesting. I wonder if they will purposely throw the ball at the camera so it looks like it’s coming out of the screen? I doubt it though, unless the players really don’t like the cameraman.

Joke for the week:
Man: Doctor Doctor I can’t stop singing “The Green, Green Grass of Home”!
Doctor: That sounds like Tom Jones syndrome.
Man: Is that common??
Doctor: It’s not unusual….

Have a great weekend.

And that’s all from us today, we’ll all be back again for me next week. Hope everyone has a great weekend, enjoy the 6 Nations, Lost or whatever it is you happen to be doing. See ya…

 We do not have any commercial relationship with the companies we’ll blog about, and in every instance there is a free or trial version of the service to try.

So without further ado, here is our first contender foursquare – let us know what you think. My colleagues and I will post others in the next few weeks, and obviously add your own favourites.

Thanks,
Nick

Nick Rawlings
Commercial & Marketing Director

and for once it’s felt like it (rather than about 6!).

Only three entries today but they’re goodies! I’m not sure where HR have got to these days, I shall have to see what we can do for next week.

So first up we’ll hear what EOW debutant (i think) Srni’s been up to…

Hi everyone, I’m Srini on behalf of the Faults team.

It was a pretty good week for us , where the faults team has considerably expanded well with few more experienced agents joining the team and as a matter of effect, the faults ticket pools are managed better inspite of having thousands of new sign ups which led to a small scale increase in the reported fault numbers.

On top of expanding the faults team we have also focused in cutting short the delay in updating the customers regarding any faults raised, as we have supplied an INTERNAL weblink to all the Technical agents to let them know which fault agent is dealing with which ticket pool,so that within a very short time scale the update could be passed onto the customers who rings in asking for the relevant update.

Also we are glad to say that we have cleared off the Phone faults queue every day keeping the other ticket pools well in control.

Myself , Jase and James who are the fault secondees for the month and are having wonderful experience in sharpening our technical skills with regards to raising faults and getting it fixed, which we will share it with our relevant team members when we are back to our respective teams next week.

Apart from dealing with fault issues, it was our immense pleasure in getting involved with the Plusnet charity committee where myself, James and Nick Savage”The Nice Man” are the volunteers from the faults team to share our ideas and plans to put in place to make this world a better place to live.

Finally a warm welcome once again to James Prestwood, Riyaz Bobat and Phil Bower to our faults team, where Alex Rolls and Harry Orford have already joined the team.All these agents are the experienced technical agents in their relevant teams and will definitely add value to the Faults team.

That is all for the time being folks, hope you all have a great weekend with the nature blessing all of us and always doing the best for us.

What a lovely way to finish a post, makes me wish it wasn’t so dark and cold outside!

Kate enjoyed her EOW experience last time out that she’s back for more!

Helloooooo!

This week in Finance we have seen the return of John after his week long skiing adventure in the French Alps, which was much needed after all the forecasting madness.

Other than catching up with 1 million emails*, John returned to more forecasting madness. He’s been busy trying to understand what more needs to be changed before we finally submit our forecast, which in turn will set the budget for the next financial year. Outside of work, John has been playing full time dad this week with wife away on business.

Sally and Ryan have been focusing on very old debts. Also, Sally’s band Hail to the Eskimo are playing at the Sherwood in Sheffield at 8pm on Saturday, so why not boogie on down?

Mark has been sorting supplier invoices and making some payments to the lucky few. Those who read last week’s EoW post will be pleased to know that The Chief is still alive.

Linda and Frances have been dealing with tickets and cheque refunds. Frances added that she is very much enjoying reading a book at the moment about horse racing and murder. (..Palomino, with the reigns, in the stable?)

James has been doing lots of corporation tax calculations and making sure that all our employees get paid. He tried a Spinning class last night (which apparently doesn’t involve an office chair and someone pushing you round at high speed. I did ask.) It was tough but he got through it.

As for me, i’ve been in a few meetings and generally crunched an awful lot of numbers.

I also had my objectives setting meeting today, which reminds me, perhaps I should have added “regular EoW postings” as an objective?

We’re all off out for drinks in Sheffield tonight and we are very excited. I’m literally bouncing in my chair as I type.

Joke for the week:
Did you hear about the monster who ate a sofa and two chairs?
He had a suite tooth….

Thankyou and goodnight.

* possibly a slight exaggeration

I’m not sure about these jokes!  Nick’s next – we’ve not seen him for a while…

Nick from the Web Development team here.

It feels like it’s been an age since I last provided a quick roundup of what our guys have been busy with. How time files.

“If you have a problem, if no one else can help, and if you can find them…”

Yes, Gary (Hannibal), Sam (Murdoch), John (B.A.) and myself (Face) have been the ‘A-Team’ this week. We’ve donned our camo and dropped in to tackle lots of project work, create various prototype screens, plus supporting content and visuals.

I’ve created some new email templates and updated some support page copy along the way. We’ve been working closely with our Consumer department for the last few days. It’s always a good feeling when we all muck in.

“I love it when a plan comes together….”

Duffy’s been working on Problems and polishing up some of our existing emails too. He’s also created a batch of shiny new ones. What a trooper he is, as he ploughed on with this despite having lost his shiny new tooth filling (only fitted yesterday!) to a piece of rogue food. Well, at least he’ll be able to whistle pretty good now.

He tells me that he’s anticipating snow too this weekend. Blimey. Again? It certainly has dropped cold again out there. We’ll be watching the skies that’s for sure.

Stay warm everyone and have a good weekend.

That looks to be it… I wish I could finish with something half as good as that ‘tache from last week… I just don’t think it’s possible!

Have a good weekend everyone,

Till the next time!

What do you think? Are tablets the future of mobile personal computing? There are plenty of rumours about bookstore tie-ins and there’s several industry pundits already talking about it being a Kindle-killer.  I think there’s a good if not huge potential market (depending on price) for such a device to watch movies and surf the web. Tomorrow we’re pretty sure to see the answer as to why Apple never did want to go down the netbook route.

* Interestingly Macrumors.com posted this yesterday “While it’s possible Apple may have ultimately decided to go a different direction, the iPad application process remains ongoing with filings as recent as this month, making this seem to be the most likely candidate.”

It’s been long tiring five days lots of work done (the fruits of which i hope you’ll see next week) and I’m absolutely shattered.  Don’t worry, it won’t stop me completing the final task before the weekend!  Here’s another brief peek into the internal goings on here at Plusnet Towers.

After a bit of a low turnout last time out, I’ve spent part of the afternoon rattling a few cages and gathering

First one in line is Carrie from the Sales Team…

Hi everyone sales team here

Its been a really strange week as we’ve not had as many calls as we were getting at the start of the month but hopefully it all picks up now we’re hitting Manchester.

On the good note we have four new starters that started on the 11th and have been doing very well at selling the products and it looks like training has improved, we also have some more sales guys that started on Monday that are in training and it will be fantastic to increase the team and a better floor when we move upto the 2nd floor at the end of the month.

Also COT have been doing really well as usual and have had a new addition chris from sales and is doing really well as he did in sales. We have a few advisers leaving us in January due to University commitments they’ll be dearly missed, good luck guys!

I wonder how long will it be before the nice weather is back, this rain is less exciting than the snow which I hear maybe coming back – great english weather as usual.

That’s all folks from sales and cot

Have a great weekend all !!!!!!

Thanks Carrie!  Matt is up next with another CPE update:

CPE…

All is good and well in the land of CPE (routers – see previous EOW posts). Plenty of stock to go around if you fancy signing up

I’ve been investigating a new piece of technology recently enabled on our routers that should allow wireless connections to be initiated based on the press of a button on the router rather than entering a password.
I am hopeful that it will work well and that it will make the lives easier for people who currently struggle to set up their wireless networks.

Have a good weekend,

Matt

Next it’s a EOW debut and warm welcome for Kate from our Finance Team…

Greetings, I’m Kate, and I’ll be your host for this evening.

This week i’ve mainly been analysing costs and playing with Excel – it’s been pivot table heaven for me.

I’ve also been talking a lot about the film “Book of Eli”, which I can recommend for any cinema-goers.
On the topic of cinema, Sally very much enjoyed Avatar in 3D last night, if you haven’t seen it yet, why not? You are missing out. On a work related note, both Sally and Ryan have mainly been chasing any customers that haven’t paid us for a long time and sending them to debt recovery (the debt that is, not the customers).
Linda and Frances have been busy working on tickets, allocating cheques and issuing cheque refunds to customers.
Mark has paid lots of suppliers, but mourns the potential death of his desk plant (namely “The Chief”). He senses the end is near for that little fella.
James has been busy busy busy as always, I heard him mutter something about corporation tax before rushing off to a meeting.

Here’s my joke of the week:
Q: How does a farmer count his cows?
A: with a cowculator!

Thankyou and goodnight.

I’m not sure what’s heavenly about Pivot tables! – each to their own eh? Finally we have Catherine from our QA Department:

Sad times in development as we say goodbye to one of our lead developers (one of the many Bens) as he leaves us to start a new job at iBuildings. He’ll be staying in Sheffield, though, so we’ll probably see him again. It’s all part of the glorious circle of life, however, so as Ben leaves we welcome Srini from the CSC to the QA team, at least for a while. We’re hoping he’ll brings us some fresh insight on how we test.
Other than that, it’s pretty much business as usual for the rest of the department. We’re working on a variety of projects from our phone product to our reseller product and as ever some of us are working hard on fixing, testing and rolling problems. There have been some interesting moments for me, too, as I break stuff and have to ask for help in fixing it. It’s all a learning experience…

And Karen keeps singing. It’s slightly disturbing.

I haven’t heard any singing, doesn’t sound like a bad thing!…

Well that’s al……hang on did I say that was the last one?  I’d forgotten that my fellow carer of all things digital Chris sent me a post just before I left work.  That’s a fail from me, interestingly it’s almost like he anticipated this event…

#bunkerfail

Apparently it’s my turn to write the end of week for our team.

So I shall begin. (for some reason I keep typing begin as being, hmmm)

We’ve all been checking our objectives this week ready for our 1-2-1 reviews with our boss. Nobody has started crying yet, so they can’t be too bad.

What’ve we done this week then?

Lots of Live Chat and some time in the forums talking to you all.
Andrew has been working away on getting some improvements ready for areas of the website, hopefully you’ll see them soon.
Matt’s continued to groom his tache, it’s getting awesomely curly now. Bob dunked his headphones in tea and I got a swanky new pair of headphones too.

Have a great weekend.

It really is a cracking ‘tache.  as a special treat I’ll end the post with this image, kindly provided by the man himself. See ya next week!

First, we have Andy from Digital Care:

Hello readers!

It’s been a while, it’s my first post of the year and I do believe it’s the first post of the year from our team. Did you have a good break?

I certainly did (apart from the rubbish illness at the end of it) but now we’re all back and working hard. Most of the team has been focusing on our Live Chat trial this week. If you’ve been looking to raise a ticket this week then some of you may have already spoke to Chris, Matt, Bob (yes his name really is Bob!) or Mand – if so then I’m sure you’ll agree that they’ve done a great job so far. Mand’s had problems getting into work due to all the ice.

PJ has spent much of the week in meetings, while preparing 1-2-1 reports for the team and practicing his best smile for the visit of John Petter (our CEO’s boss @ BT and currently head of BT Consumer).

That just leaves me, I’ve been mainly looking at our broadband speed support pages (both the faults and informational ones), ploughing through KPI reports and bugging our QA manager to find out when I’ll be able to publish some updates to the Member Centre.

That’s about it I think… there’s been some snow too. Things got a bit slippy for a while but we’re ok now, although I think Mand’s been stuck in her local village for about 3 weeks!

Bye for now, see you next week!

Thanks Andy, and now for an update from Business Improvement… first up it’s James:

This week I’ve been working on a live problem investigation for a project we rolled out recently, as well as looking at new activations [Ed: this means as in activating new customers’ accounts] and working with our South Africa provisioning team, managing our record sign ups that we’ve had this week – ending week in a very good position.

[Ed: I should point out that this week we saw our best-ever day for sales, which is testament to the fact that all our exciting marketing activities are starting to pay massive dividends. This is an exciting time for Plusnet!]

Meanwhile here’s what Luke has been up to:

So another hectic week in PN Towers. This week I have specified a faults dashboard so we can see in great detail how we and our suppliers are performing on a range of fault areas.
This is key as we look to have more customers on the new ‘up to 20Mb’ network.

I then had the mind -blowingly numb task of specifying the exact criteria and what feeds in to it on our system for each field and how that should be calculated.

Yesterday and today I have been doing some resource forecasting based on fault volumes and how often we call our supplier with regards to faults.

Looking forward to some mighty fine ales this evening. Much needed. Have a great weekend all and enjoy the thaw!!!

Thanks Luke – the final nugget from BI is from me:

Finally, I have worked on a number of things this week… firstly, preparing for a workshop next Monday afternoon to meet with a phone system supplier. We’re wanting to update our customer support centre’s (CSC’s) phone system, as the kit we have in now just doesn’t meet our business needs any more. We’re looking at many options and Monday’s meeting will run through some of the latest technologies.

I’ve also been helping the sales team with two recruitment days, so that we are ready for the next batch of marketing activity and able to keep up with all the calls! So I got the chance to do some assessments, role plays and three interviews. It was quite nice to be the interviewer instead of the interviewee!

I’ve done some work around knowledge management, too – which is us working towards a new way of collating all of Plusnet’s operational customer support knowledge into one place. That will also be covered off in the supplier meeting on Monday, as we look around for a good solution.

After such a busy week at Plusnet with a visit from John Petter, Company Rally, interruption to our entire water supply, record number of sales, plus all the usual busyness, I think everyone deserves a relaxing weekend!

Have a good one and talk you again soon,

Ali McGowan

Just a few days ago we heard of the demise of the Tiscali brand, after TalkTalk finally killed it off. Trouble is, there are still plenty of people stuck on Tiscali packages and TalkTalk is increasing the prices of their packages by £5 a month if they don’t take a TalkTalk phone line.

That’s a terrible way to start the year, so we’ve put together a special deal where Plusnet customers and anyone migrating from Tiscali can both get rewarded.

Recommend us and we’ll send you £25 in John Lewis vouchers for each Tiscali customer who signs-up and migrates to Plusnet on your recommendation*. Tell your friends to enter our special code ’tiscali’ when they register via this page and they’ll get their first 3 months free too.

Make sure they also keep a note of your Plusnet username, as we’ll ask for this once they’re up and running so we can get your vouchers to you.

Of course you’ll still get our standard referral discount off your monthly bill for everyone who signs up too. There’s no limit to the number of people you can recommend, or the number of vouchers you can get. In fact, if you recommend enough people we’ll start paying you each month!

You’ll need to hurry, as this limited time offer ends 31st January 2010.

*You can read all the legal bits and bobs over at the offer terms and conditions page.

It’s been aaaages since I did a Plusnet End Of Week. We all went a bit quiet during the Christmas period, but I promised we’ll be writing home more often from now on!

Now, on with the entries!

First up today we have Nick who is our Head of Business and Partner Sales

What’s happening in the world of business & partner?

Apart from gearing up for a busy final quarter, 3 of the team have decided to quit smoking – Gordon & Dave are doing well but I can’t quite say the same (weak willed!).

We’re trailing some new sales channels for business in Jan and are in the midst of building the forecast for 10/11 – just gotta love those spreadsheets!

Best Xmas cracker joke found so far: what did the snowman say to the other snowman?? I smell carrots!!!!!!!!!

Here’s to a prosperous 2010!

You can tell Nick is trying to give up smoking. He’s got really grumpy!

Next up is Barbara from the HR Team

Happy New Year to everyone, including our new starters who came in on the 29th for their first days training. It’s been a very busy first week of this snowy New Year for us in HR; with lot’s of recruitment activity going on throughout departments.

We’ve also been coordinating the Performance Levelling Process and getting slides ready for next weeks Rally.

Matt’s turn, who looks after our CPE/Routers

Happy new year!

It’s been a quiet time for CPE over the Christmas holidays. We’ve sent out far fewer routers than usual over the past 2 weeks because of all the extra bank holidays.

There seems to have been some snow and cold weather over the past week (if you hadn’t noticed), so we’ve had to keep a close eye on the conditions to make sure that our postal carrier is able to make deliveries on time.

We are considering upgrading to a wireless N router for our standard CPE offering and we’ve been thinking about the best way to run a trial for these new routers.

Have a good weekend.

And finally, James from the Customer support Centre

Firstly, Happy New Year from everyone in the Customer Support Centre, here in cold, dark Sheffield!

This week the long hangovers from Christmas and the New Year celebrations have cleared so everybody has started calling us again! All those little niggling problems that weren’t really important enough to care about over the festive period, seem a lot more important now. If I got a pound today for every time I’ve heard “it’s been broken for two weeks” and it’s the first time we have been told about it, I’d probably have two pounds! This, along with the havoc that the snow has caused means that we have had a busy week indeed! Not only did we have half of the CSC snowed in this week meaning less people manning the phones, we have also had the increased number of problems caused by the weather. With ADSL being rather delicate at times, it does like to behave a little like a Eurostar train when the temperatures drop…

We seem to be coping well considering though, the people who have battled through the snow have done well to keep on top of the call volumes and the people who haven’t been able to get in have been working hard on tickets raised from the comfort of their own home! We have also had a number of new faces appear in the CSC this week, which is helping smarten up the place a bit and is helping us greatly to get back on track and put us back in a much more comfortable place.

Well that’s enough jabbering from me, thank you for reading and have a good weekend!

Do you guys have any New Years Resolutions you’d like to share with us? One of mine is to start learning to drive again!

And on that note, it’s my home time. (well, technically it was over an hour ago, but *shrug*).

Signing off!

k