Remember remember the 6th of November, because it’s the day that system problems prevented Andrew from posting when he wanted to earlier resulting in it being done much later than he originally planned!

Never mind.. on with the show as they say and firstly while you can always rely on HR, we’ve decided to give them a week off so we’ll instead start with Rowan from the Durban branch of the CSC…

Hi all,

Well… THEY PICKED ME to complete the end of week post on behalf of the CSC SA. Yippee… I haven’t done this in a while so please bear with me.

This has been a great week thus far and the weather has been ‘oh so nice’ to run off to the beach. This has been quiet a busy week for the Customer Services Team, the guys have worked really hard pushing out those tickets and answering those calls daily but making sure that it’s done in a fun jovial environment. I’m really proud of all the guys on the floor for pulling together and meeting our SLA’s and Key Performance Indicators so a big up to the team. Sadly, Preeshan our new Customer Service Manager was out on his own this week whilst the others were on study leave. Luckily Sameer, Dev and Ronel (The other Customer Service Team Leader’s) were on hand to assist him with the workload.

This weekend’s going to be really great after a long hard week so we are all really looking forward to it. Lastly, not forgetting our guest from Sheffield, Brad who is here on a training mission and strangely enough is turning a bright pink color due to the famous Durban sun!!

Anyway, that’s it for me. Cheers all.

Be cool stay safe and sooner than you realise, it’ll be Christmas already!!!

Rowan (on behalf of the SA Customer service team)

Sun? What is this Sun you speak of Rowan?  Nothing but rain and more rain in Sheffield this week, I am officially jealous!

Here’s Duffy with a quick update from an unusually quiet Web Team…

Afternoon all, Duffy here. Another busy week for the team, though we’re down a couple of bodies today, Sam being off and Nick being poorly. Get well soon!

Gary has been busily mocking up, erm, mockups. Jonny has been getting into his new role as receptionist – hopefully he’ll have a better appreciation of what the regulars have to do (hopefully his tache growing exploits are amusing the vistors to Plusnet towers, it’s only been a few days so it might be too soon – ed).

I’m trying to learn more XHTML/CSS skills so I can use crayons as well as pencils in my day-to-day job. Nick was doing some project work and we’re working on getting problem management moved from me to him.

And Phill, well, Phill once again… *tumbleweed*

I shall see if we can get some charity tache action up in a blog sometime soon, no promises at this stage.. perhaps if we make enough noise about it?

Moving on and here’s Tommo with an update from Networks…

Ah, the End of Week, and coincidentally it’s the end another week. It’s dark and miserable out so must be getting near to Christmas. So what’s been happening in the world of networks.

Unfortunately I only got the nudge to draft something for the end of week after hometime ticked around so I will have to be a bit briefer about the network activities this week.

There’s been lots of work going off to resolve the speed and performance issues that some of our customers have been seeing, we’ve seen some steady improvements through the week but there’s still more work to be done as we evaluate the success of each change.

Our migration of customers from our LLU network is almost complete, the last of the customers were migrated this week and we are now just in the mop up phase before final decommission.

And that’s all from us for this week, have a great weekend, enjoy the fireworks…

And last but by no means least, here’s Matt with the goings on from the land of Comms Analog Hate Digital Care…

Hi, everybody! I’m not Dr. Nick. Sorry for any disappointment.

Well, the week in Comms. We’ve had a few people off this week – Poor Chris has hurt his foot, and Pete’s been training. As ever we remain resolute in the face of such adversity.

Well, there’s been a fair old bit of work relating to 21CN (that’s the new up to 20Mb broadband) and as ever a lot of forum work. We’ve also (well, mainly Bob, but the rest of us too) been helping out where we can with the network too and are happy to report it’s behaving much better. We’ll keep you posted via the forums and of course the service status feed.

Not much more to report and as it’s Friday and beer o’clock it’s time for the off.

Thanks all.

That’s it for today!  Ta-ta and toodle pip.

It’s been a nice week off (cheers Kelly) but I’m back in the chair again for this weeks End of Week posting.

It’s been a hectic day (and week come to think of it) for me personally, lots of stuff published and lots of things to keep tabs on.

I’ll come back to that in a minute as Carrie from the Sales team wants to post!

Hi Everyone Its Halloween!!!!!

What a busy week we’ve had in the sales team. Its been a challenge with the amount of calls and with the BT/Manpower guys gone we’ve had to work even harder to make sure where taking every call that comes in, also everyone has had to work harder to finish sign up no macs and contact sales as we have had a big increase on these. Also a few of us have been trained on COT which has been really good to learn a different job and the COT guys have been really helpful on when we’ve asked them questions and also they’ve worked hard to increase the conversion rate on retains which have been fantastic.
We are so glad its friday, a weekend of rest, well for some of us and where expecting to have a really busy week again next week which is so exciting to sign up more customers.

Have a great weekend and don’t scare too many people.

It’s Haloween? I completely forgot! – I’ll have to keep an eye out for the hordes of dressed up students that will no doubt be flooding the streets and bars around my home right now..

On with the show and as somebody famous once said, you can always rely on HR, take it away Jen…

Haven’t done an acrostic for a while so here goes…
All of us have had a busy week
Loads of recruitment activity has been happening
Levels for performance reviews have been submitted
Of course it was Laura’s birthday on Monday, belated wishes!
We set up the Company Induction for Monday
Employee relations has been taking up Gemma’s time
Employee engagement has been taking up mine, trying to get all our company information submitted to Best Companies
Now it’s the weekend, phew. Nearly witching hour!! WHooooooo.

How on earth could I forget about Halloween? Never mind.

Right, back to me to finish off.  I think PJ was going to mention this in last weeks post but he forgot! – We’ve launched a new Windows 7 support section, take a look! We’ll be expanding it as time and needs dictate and we’ve already started this with our Windows 7 shortcut keys guide over in the Community Library!  Keep your eyes peeled for more to come.

Also there’s been a few of you worried about Wireless Security following last nights Watchdog.  We’ve updated our guide on Wi-Fi security in response to this, read Chris’s blog to find out more.

That’s all there’s time for today, see you next week!

Affectionately named ‘Plusnet 15′, we’ve already lit half of the new pipe (2 x 155Mbps segments) and have customers connecting to it as I type. If you do manage to get onto the new central then you’ll find that your traffic routes through the gateway known as thn-ag2.

This extra capacity will help us resolve the recent complaints of slow speeds during the evening, something we’ve been chronicling over on our Service Status feed.

Gordon Vaughan, clearly demonstrating that he’s smarter than the average business and partner staffer, will be putting his wits to the test on today’s Channel 4’s legendary Countdown! Not quite as dangerous as the 3 rounds with the Brixton Bomber but equally taxing on the old grey matter!

If you want to catch Gordon, he makes his appearance at 3.25pm on Channel 4.

Good luck Flash, knock ‘em dead.

Following on from the BBC’s Watchdog report last night about Wifi security, we’ve been receiving a number of calls from concerned customers worried that their wireless router is not secure.

Here’s some basic advice and we’ll show you where to get some guidance on how to protect your wireless network.

We take your security seriously and, provided you take simple steps to make sure protection is enabled, you shouldn’t be overly anxious about your home network.

Wifi-networks are protected using a passkey system, generally using WPA or the even more secure WPA2-PSK system. The Thomson gateway 585v7 we supply is configured to use WPA security by default. This will work with most Wifi devices and if you’ve got one of these your network should be protected.

If you want to make sure your home Wifi network is secure then we have a guide on securing your wireless on our support pages.

Don’t forget though. If you do change your SSID or your passkey, remember to make the same changes on your Wifi-enabled computer or laptop too, otherwise you won’t connect to your home network.

Public Hotspots

Last night’s watchdog report focused on Wifi hotspots. You’ll find these at airports, cafe etc and are designed for anyone to be able to connect to them, often free-of-charge. This is very different to your home network where you can restrict who has access to it by choosing to use WPA or WPA2 security and setting the passkey.

If you do use Wifi hotspots when you take your laptop out and about, make sure that the security software on your computer is up to date and you have an anti-virus and firewall installed.

If you have any important emails which contain confidential information, try and avoid sending these from unsecure public Wifi hotspots as this increase the risk of the contents being intercepted and read by hackers.

Remember:
When you’re not using the wireless signal on the router you should turn this off.

If you’ve got any questions about wireless security please pop over to our discussion forums.

Chris

An announcement is due later today but it’s looking like strike action is set to resume tomorrow.

Once again, we’ll be using ParcelForce to deliver hardware during the strike so delays should be avoided.

You can read more about the strikes and what will happen over on the BBC News site.

If any of our plans change, or the strikes are cancelled, we’ll update this blog to let you know.

I’ve been a little slack in my End Of Week editing duties recently, mostly due to my being away on holiday to Istanbul, but I’m back now and Andy B has quickly jumped on me to get back on the wagon.

Well, what a week to pick up for editing! Our Development department has been furiously busy getting our new product set ready for it’s roll out in the really unsociable hours of Thursday morning and since then we’ve been working to make it it’s all working correctly.

That’s meant a couple of late nights for the team, but that’s to be expected on a project as large as this one. If you aren’t sure what I’m talking about, go and read our announcement for Up to 20Mb.

We’ve been juggling this with a couple of issues with our Faults platform as well, so apologies if you’ve seen any issues when trying to raising us one.

What updates do we have from the other teams? First up is Barbara from the HR Team.

Healthy food, walking to work (bus strike), signing up to be blood donors, relaxation techniques learnt, sugar levels and blood pressure checked, ways to stop smoking discussed, reflexology and massage tasters sampled, goody bags received phew!

Therese and Gemma have also had chance to up sticks and have now joined the CSC floor, by taking up residence in room 7; Jen, Laura, and me have decided to stay with Dev (we’ve got used to them passing though; they also make us nice cups of coffee from time to time).

We’ve also organised TSA and CSA interviews (Ed: Technical and Customer Support Advisors!), prepared MDLP (Ed: Management Development and Leadership Program) module 2 information and facilities; communicated final levelling scores to management, made amendments to the Company Handbook which will be posted in the near future, and held D&G workshops for managers. Happy birthday to Laura on Monday too!

Cheers Barbs!

Next up, Jonathan from the Web Gang

Goodness, that was the week that was! It’s been a busy one with the product launch. We’ve also been fixing problems, some nips and tucks and a few smoothed out lumps and bumps.

Never one to avoid work, Nick went on holiday, the slacker. I’ve been suffering from PMF (Peruvian Man Flu), but battling through. Sam enjoyed his massage, courtesy of our Health and Safety Week offerings. Gary has been drinking tea like there’s no tomorrow and Jonny has been letting others make him tea, a shining example of a natural delegator. Last but not least, Phil said “no” when asked if he wanted me to write anything on his behalf.

We’re off to recharge the batteries. Have a good weekend, everyone.

Alex from Technical Support

Lots of new things to learn and new questions to answer this week with the changes to our residential products. Not only have we released our new PlusNet Premium package but our entire signup journey now allows customers to take advantage of BT’s new 21cn network (up to 20mbps speed where available). Although these changes may seem small from a customer point of view the changes on our side have been huge!

Aside from all things new we have had our usual busy evenings on calls, busier than normal in fact. This may be due to some issues with our automatic systems which will deal with raising new broadband faults. Some customers (and us of course) have had problems raising faults which has inevitably caused a rise in the number of calls that come in to our contact centre.

Also in the CSC this week we have also put up a large motor racing track poster on the wall in the shape of the PlusNet logo. Next to this is a list of all the major Formula 1 constructors…. more to come about this later.

I’ll sign off at this point, back to work for me. Enjoy the weekend all.

Finally, Andy from the Consumer Team. Who you say? We used to call them the Marketing Team!

It’s been a busy week for the Consumer team. This week our new broadband product has been rolled out for new and existing customers – Plusnet Premium. Our Pro package has been tweaked too, and now offers 20GB peak time usage, which is up from 15GB (pricing remains the same). Our home phone products have changed too, so our current range of products now offer free 0845 and 0870 calls in their inclusive talk time.

On top of this, we’ve talked about our future plans for colouring in, posting things that we’ve coloured in, sent the newsletter (well, sort of, depending on who you speak to), and updated our Pro customers on their usage change. Chris has had an astonishing week too, well, when he hasn’t been driven to distraction by the ongoing Cheryl v. Whitney debate. He’s actually used another program other than Excel for a change, and made some pretty slides in PowerPoint. I’m jealous, as I only got to make one slide this week. We love PowerPoint up here

Ooh, stop press, PJ has appeared with a last minute post from his crew.

Not much to report this week. It’s pretty quiet really so I’ve given the guys the day off. Ha! They wish.

Only joking of course. It’s been well, what’s the word? Busy. Yes, that blooming ‘b’ word again. But honestly what can I say? It’s been a busy week.

It’s nice to be finally live with the up to 20Mbps products finally. And pleasing that all the hard work that has gone into preparing the support content and FAQs seems to have led to a smooth product launch from our perspective. There’s an awful lot of prep work that goes into a product launch and this has been one of the biggest in quite some time.

We’ve had Mike training the call centres on the new products over the past 3 weeks. Putting together the training material was pretty demanding on both him and Mand, who was instrumental in collating the facts and key points about the new products. Mike, Mand, Matt, Brad & Chris in the UK and Justin in SA all helped to deliver the training in time for launch.

So, as I look over the floor and see the last few developers starting to finish up on their bug squashing and report writing for the week, I think it’s time I left. Off to the bouldering wall for me I think. Or to the pub perhaps, we certainly all deserve a beer!

Oh, btw, you can follow us on Twitter if you are into that sort of thing: http://twitter.com/plusnet

Our new products offer our customers a greatly increased usage allowance as well as the potential for much higher speeds.

• Value remains the same and will offer standard up to 8Mb speeds.
• Pro will be getting a speed boost to up to 20Mb, along with a usage increase to 20GB.
• Brand new Premium will have 80GB peak time usage and up to 20Mb speeds.

For all of our products, usage between midnight and 8am is free and doesn’t count towards your usage allowance.

Premium will cost £11.99 for the first 3 months and then just £15.99 if you’re in a low-cost area: see http://usertools.plus.net/exchanges/ - if not it’s still great value at £19.99.

You can see the costs, speeds and usage of the products in this table.

 If you’re already a customer and want the faster speeds, don’t worry. Provided your exchange has been enabled, we’ll be upgrading customers on certain older products in stages over the coming year. We’ll let you know more about this soon.  Although ADSL2+ isn’t yet available to all, coverage in the UK is increasing rapidly and currently is around 40% of the population.

Along with potentially faster speeds, ADSL2+ (up to 20Mb) allows us to offer a much improved order journey. During the signup process we’ll ask you for your mobile number and keep you up to date with the progress of your broadband order through SMS text messages.

All of our products now have a 12 month contract or a no contract option.  If you move to another provider within the first year you’ll just need to pay us back any setup or hardware costs you didn’t need to pay upfront.

We’ve got more details of the new product and changes to the existing ones on the ADSL2+ Community FAQ here.

If you want to ask us questions about this blog, or would just like to discuss it, you’ll be able to over on the discussion forums.

That’s two whole 622Mbps pipes we’ve lit since July!

Those that have been suffering from the recent peak time speed problems will be pleased to hear that we’re not going to stop there either! We’ve more capacity scheduled to be lit next week too!

Anybody connecting to the new segment will see their traffic passing through the gateway known as thn-ag1. You can find out what gateway you’re connected to by running a traceroute or using the Gateway Checker on the Usertools website (this might not work if you’re a Madasafish customer).

When adding new capacity it can take some time for the network to ‘balance’ i.e. distribute users evenly across gateways. In order to accelerate this process it is sometimes necessary for us to temporarily disconnect a small number of customers from the Internet. We’ve no intention of doing this at the moment but if that changes we’ll let you know via our Service Status and Twitter feeds.

We use Royal Mail to deliver hardware to our customers, so to avoid the chance of delays we’ve decided to switch to ParcelForce while the strikes are in effect.  Deliveries won’t need to be signed for so it should be business as usual.

You can read more about the strikes and what will happen over on the BBC News site.

If any of our plans change, or the strikes are cancelled, we’ll update this blog to let you know.