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