PlusNet in the news 6th June 08

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I thought it might be interesting to post a round up of the places where PlusNet has been in the news this week, with a short reaction to each story. This morning we appeared in The Telegraph in a piece about the BBC's plans to stream BBC1 live from their website later this year.

"Both Tiscali and PlusNet have been vocal critics of the iPlayer, because the huge amount of data involved puts a new strain on the internet’s capacity."

Disappointingly The Telegraph has completely missed the point of the blogs we've been doing about the iPlayer. Saying we are critics of the iPlayer couldn't be further from the truth. As we've stated in several blogs on the subject, we love the iPlayer! It will be fascinating to see what effect broadcasting BBC1 on the internet will have on internet traffic. My own feeling is that people will use it to watch TV at work - I can't see people choosing to watch BBC1 online in the evening when it won't be as good quality as watching a 'normal' TV. I'm sure Dave Tomlinson will dig into this in more detail in the future. The biggest story in UK broadband this week was the launch of Ofcom's new Code of Conduct on broadband speeds and this was covered pretty extensively in all the papers and online. Thinkbroadband included us in their list of ISPs who have signed up to the new code. We also appeared in a story on The Register who cited us for our transparent approach to traffic management.

"If an ISP has deployed kit to throttle specific protocols such as BitTorrent, it should publish the fact on its website, and provide details of the times when the brakes are applied. PlusNet is the only ISP we can think of that does this properly at the moment."

We spoke to Real Business last week who published a story on how PlusNet has improved since the acquisition by BT. We particularly liked Rebecca's quote about our legendary customer service 🙂

"One year on, PlusNet’s customer service is legendary. The firm won nine out of 11 categories at the uSwitch awards, not to mention Best Consumer ISP at the ISPAs, the Oscars of the internet industry."

Another story reported on several sites earlier this week was Virgin Media's changes to its traffic management policy. We were included in stories by IT Pro and VNUnet who both related the story to our recent survey showing four out of five broadband users don't know ho much they download each month. In other news this week we published a report on our fault handling survey which was picked up by ISP Review. The Doncaster Star did a story on the forthcoming Sychosis LAN event at the Doncaster Dome which we're sponsoring. If you've seen PlusNet in the news this week and we haven't included it here please let us know and we'll add it. Thanks for reading. Neil Armstrong Products Director, PlusNet