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:

---

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

---

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.