8MB Upgrade

Just wondering when Plusnet are planning on resuming the upgrades for its premier customers? I put in a request to be upgrade about 2 weeks before the bulk regrade tool was stopped. I believe other ISP's are still or have completed upgrading their customers.

PN have not given any dates for when they plan to restart the upgrades via PUG or any other medium. I'm not sure BT have actually done enough yet as there are still Max issues being reported in increasing numbers.

I think they have. In their press release/presentation to investors, they said August.

If providers wait until no issues are reported we'd never have moved out of the original Home 500 trials.

Plusnet are still provisioning people on Max, all new customers are put straight onto a Max connection.

One idea would be for there to a special support line to be set up for those regraded onto Max, and this can be staffed by people up to speed on what is happening.

Home 1000 and Home 2000 both went through teeting issues, perhaps less of them since the product was simpler.

Andrew

>>One idea would be for there to a special support line to be set up for those regraded onto Max, and this can be staffed by people up to speed on what is happening.

This would certainly be a move I'd like to see. I had no end of problems after being "Maxed", and I'm not convinced I ever got to talk to anyone who really knew the score, and could advise me sensibly. I am sure that somewhere in PN, there must have been someone who could recognise my problems, and would have known what to do about them. But there was no mechanism for putting me in touch with such a person.

T.

It does seem strange for Plusnet to say there are too many problems to move people over to Max, but yet anyone who joins goes on it.
Surely long term customers should be able to request a move to Max, because not all people are having a horror story. I have friends (Using Plusnet recommended by me) on Max with no problems.
I work from home a lot and my colleagues tell me that the extra upload speed makes a big difference.

The point is there has not been that many new customers lately so they can cope with the level of falts that would/will have occured with new people joining. It's when they do bulk upgrades of several 1000 that the failure rate, even in low %ages, causes PN problems.

Until the failure rate returns to a manageable level they are not going to risk putting through lots of upgrades.

I did not say they are waiting for no error rates, I'm saying the failure/fault rate is still too high for bulk regrades to be done - whether this is all BTs fault is down to interpretation but both sides have to rethink how they are dealing with this problem. Max is still too unstable on low quality lines and BT still have a number of key problems to solve properly, rather than the few workarounds they have implemented so far.

Added to that the problems the are having with LLU migrations, I'm sure PN don't want to get into the same CS situation thay have had over the past few months, caused mainly by the high number of faults they had to deal with.

As for August... We all know how reliable PlusNet dates are, don't we

Just a Thought,

If the MAX upgrades saved as much money for Plusnet as the LLU upgrades I strongly suspect that the upgrades would never have beed paused for even a second.

As no one could say the Tiscali upgrades have been trouble free. and customers have been coerced onto LLU as fast as Plusnet can push them, with very little chance of a free way back to IPstream and a new ISP if they want one.

I personally am in the process of migrating over the deliberate lack of information given to customers over the stopping of the upgrade program and I'm very disapointed in plusnets cynical attitude towards their customers.

Besides the perennial complaint that CS agents don't read the entirety of a question before posting a glib response, I have only one gripe about the way that PlusNet has dealt with the BT problems with my MaxDSL migration. My gripe is that there is no continuity of attention from PlusNet and that the nearest available agent will deal with your last update to the ticket without any apparent attention to the history.

Having said that, PlusNet have done what they can to resolve the problems with RAMBO and incorrectly applied bRAS throttles on my line. Unfortunately, there are still inadequacies in the automated BT systems which cause the line to be throttled bsck to 500Kbps after a single glitch in line quality. I believe that the work being done in my exchange are causing the glitches resulting in my line being throttled to 500Kbps after achieving data rates of ~ 3000Kbps and consistent sync speeds > 4000Kbps.

I hear tales of "Blip Logic" being implemented by BT such that a single glitch in line quality will be ignored by the bRAS profiling monitor ..... as long as the line has consistently run at much higher speeds for an interval of 14 days. I am now on my sixth day of such an interval and living in hope of achieving the nirvana of Blip Logic being applied.

Until BT get their act together, PlusNet are right to suspend the bulk regrade to MaxDSL. If my line glitches back to 500Kbps again, I will ask PlusNet to put me back on IPStream 2000.

R

Its interesting to see AOL and BT Retail both opting to not do long lines with Max.

Max was originally for lines with <43dB attenuation, but then expanded, and its behaviour is not ideal at the lower speeds.

At the end of the day I don't know exactly how many regrades Plusnet did in the few months, perhaps 20,000, one wonders how many faults these actually generated, and if this was higher than with other providers. If no higher, why did Plusnet CS hit the problems - is it the system was not really set up to work with the sorts of issues Max generated, and add doing LLU at the same time, and a mish mash of terms meaning confusion was easy.

At present we still see people posting in an attempt to get someone to consider their MAC request as a ticket has gone unanswered.

Andrew

An idea to make some people happy and reduce error rate - only put through regrades for those customers who are on a 2Mbps service now, and who agree to the regrade.

Get all those done, then you can move onto the 1Mbps users etc

I don't think it is a failure rate with Max, i.e. its rare to get zero service, just the level of blips and complaints, is some of this down to expectation that started to build in April 2005.

Andrew

I suggested a while back that they could charge a fee for people who really wanted to be regraded to Max during this period of no regrading, and that before the order was placed they'd perform a woosh test to get some stats about the line. If it seemed suitable (eg: good line stats) then they'd get the regrade order placed. If it wasn't then it'd be declined (for now) and the money (

I think the problem was/is they already had a high number of tickets outstanding before the MAXDSL started and not enough qualified staff to deal with them. Added to that they also started the LLU migration that appears to be chucking up more problems than MAX.

We were told a couple of weeks ago that ticket levels were back to normal but that does not appear to be the case. The fact customers are finding it so difficult to get through on the phone can't be helping matters.

Of course right in the middle of all these problems they decide to re organise the CSC and get rid of some of the agents to add to the problems.

The figures I have are ~60,000 Max upgrades were completed / ordered prior to the upgrades being suspended, with around 10% failure rates (be it initial failure or on-going speed/Bras/Other issues) which is almost 10 times the normal failure rates I think. So that is 6000 faults to deal with which PN clearly could not handle for various reasons (some being BT not being able to deal with the level of faults either) meaning the whole process broke down.

Many other ISPs have been trickle feeding the Max upgrade process rather than doing bulk regrades of 3,500 per week, which means thay can handle the high failure rate. It was the number of upgrades in a short period of time plus the high fault levels that have caused all the problems with PN CS.

It is clear PN took on too many changes with both Max and LLU being done at the same time and both generating more faults than was expected (as you say, the trials were done on shorter lines so there were less problems). CS are still a long way from being what PN want them to be and what they were last year but things are improving as the fault levels decrease, but there are still a lot of internal changes to be made which will take many more months. Only time will tell if it proves successful or not.

In reply to:

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We were told a couple of weeks ago that ticket levels were back to normal but that does not appear to be the case.

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It seemed from what I experienced with my tickets, that they managed to get them down to answering within a couple of minutes for the night before the "it's all back to normal, like we said it'd be" on the date that they had said they'd get it back by, and then straight away it went back up to how it was before.

A lot of effort put in to answering the tickets to meet a target, publicise the target as being beaten, and then let it all fall apart again because the ticket answering time isn't being trumpeted as PlusNet's latest and greatest achivement. What they needed to do was say how they'd got it down, and continue to update everyone on how they'd managed to keep it down, to prove that it was an ongoing thing. Their own CS stats page shows that they're woefully beyond the "target closure time" right now - and it's worth remembering that when it was a "low" figure PlusNet used to argue that it counted all tickets, including the internal ones which were immediately closed, so right now the actual average time to have a ticket response from PlusNet must be several days (it certainly is for the ones I have open). It's from one extreme to another with PlusNet - they either take days to answer, failing to meet the target, or over-achieve by replying possibly "too quickly" which results in other issues getting backlogged (phones for example). Difficult situation to be in, but one that a company such as PlusNet should really be able to sort out.

I have a problem with this so called reorganisation to CS and it taking several months to kick in. I can't for the life of me see how any reorganisation of a few CS staff can take several months to work. It either works when it is reorganised or it does not and from the many post it's not working.

Customers can't get through on the phone and tickets go unanswered for days and in some cases weeks or not at all.

The last time I regraded it was to 2Mb and cost

As somebody who was LLU'd and suffered repeated complete loss of sync. I can see that is still also an issue for +net. There own forums are still throwing up customers who are suffering this issue with some suffering repeated loss of sync which then takes days and sometimes weeks to resolve. Those being LLU'd are often being put onto ADSL 2/2+ kit and I'm left wondering with the variety of consumer modems in use about compatibility levels - mine should have been OK but it kept breaking.The linksys wag354g for instance has a firmware which is not downloadable from linksys which supposedly introduces adsl2 support - despite the modem already claiming support for adsl2.

I was then ceased/re-provided onto BT MAX, and in my circumstances I can honestly say "thank god for that". My line attenuation is 60 and my line length is somewhere between 5.5km and 6km, I was on 1Mbit. Once max'd the SNR quickly went upto 12db and interleaving was switched on. Now I tried using a Belkin 7633uk4a router/modem which a number of people on bulldog forums etc rave about and I also tried a linksys wag354g. The Belkin proved to be useless as it was resyncing every half an hour with no tweaking. The wag354g holds the line no problems and I maybe get a resync every other day which is at a level that doesn't bother me (tends to be overnight too).

But it goes to show that if I only had the belkin I'd be moaning away at +net and BT. I have no idea why the wag works better for me but after about 3 weeks I tried plugging the belkin in again and it was just as bad.

I have a pretty stable 2meg now which is great.

One of the main advantages in using the Belkin router on Bulldog lines is that the Belkin and Bulldog's exchange equipment use the same chipsets.

I have no idea what exchange equipment Tiscali or BT uses. I have a Belkin 7633 router. Compared to my ZyXEL 662 it is a pooorly featured router but I use it because I get between 1.5 & 2 Mb higher speed on my Bulldog line. My experience of it is the opposite to yours.

Tiscali use Globalspan on my local exchange for ADSL2+.

I'm using a Speedtouch 716WL with version 5 firmware. Its very stable on ADSL2+ but Microsoft Vista does not like it.

Edited by deleted (Mon 07-Aug-06 06:27:02)

HI Ian,

I didn't mean to dig particularly about the Belkin, it seemed to behave OK for the LLU connection (when it was up, which wasn't very often). I was just saying that it's no wonder ISP's can struggle when kit for one person is great and for another not which I guess is related to line conditions and the differing equipment in the xchange.

Cheers, Tom.

Tom

I completely agree with you. To be honest the Belkin is not the router I would choose were it not for the fact that the S/N margin it syncs at can be tweeked from the user's end. It is a poorly specified router, looks like it is made from the remains of an old tin can. The support of the end user with their myriad of different kit must be a nightmare hence the reason why ISPs such as Bulldog virtually "give away" a specific brand of router.

Exactly.

Sky and Talktalk etc wont offer support to any routers except the ones they offer, and rightly so.