Update on Plans for 2007

[#1]

Back in January, we published our plans for 2007. We thought that it was about time we updated you with our progress on these plans. Some of the items are complete, others are well underway, and there are some that we haven't made as much progress on as we'd have liked. The traffic light marking scheme () should make it pretty clear which are which! :) Service

• Broadband network capacity
  • We’ve had a good period of stability, with network capacity operating to design and no significant customer difficulties. We published an updated Broadband Blueprint last month and Dave Tomlinson is keeping up a regular commentary on our Broadband network and what’s happening with capacity in the Traffic Management Blog.

• Email
  • Following recent email issues, email status is red. We now have more work to do on Spam, and stability must be proven.

• Customer Support
  • All indications are that customer support is functioning well, with good customer survey feedback results and generally internal and customer SLAs are being met. The launch of business support was completed successfully and this has proved popular with our business customers. If you want to comment on the service that you have received have a look at our new customer feedback survey.

New products

• BT Home Hub
  • Expected to be available in November.

• BT Fusion
  • At present we have no expected delivery date and we are continuing to investigate the most appropriate way to offer this or a similar service to our customers.

• BT Vision
  • Again, we currently have no expected delivery date and no firm plans for implementation of BT Vision. We are investigating an alternative Set-top box, which combines Freeview and a streaming IPTV solution, but there are no confirmed details at this point.

• PlusTalk
  • Overall PlusTalk reliability has improved, but is still not where we want to be. We still expect to deliver more on our promised improvements to reliability and functionality of our Voice over IP offering.

• Web Hosting
  • We have developed a new web hosting platform for our sister company Just The Name which is based on the industry standard ‘Plesk’ software. The most appropriate way to provide this same improvement to PlusNet customers is still being discussed, but progress has been made.

Marketing / Customer Comms

• Transparency
  • We know that we can still improve further and have a number of things in the pipeline: Our new service status tool, latest portal RAG Update and more policies on the portal. We will also be introducing further service monitoring functionality on the portal.

• Community support Site
  • The community site has been launched successfully, and a roadmap for the next phase of improvement is nearly finalised and will be published very soon.

• You stay we pay
  • The you stay we pay offer was removed in April as promised.

• Open days
  • After the very successful open day earlier in the year, we agreed to hold another one. This has still to be planned.

We've suffered a number of set-backs this year. We spent the last three months undertaking a huge programme of platform upgrades and background improvements, which didn't directly give customers any feature improvements, but have put us in a position where we can now focus on delivering as much as possible from our plans. We'll post a further update on the progress we are making later in the year. Chris Cotterill

[#2]

Hi Chris, Normally traffic lights work very well because even a colour blind person can distinguish which light is on or off; that is to say,bottom equals green, top equals red and middle equals amber. Trust me when I say that it does not work very well, for colour blind people, when used as above, in isolation. Perhaps it would be possible to use an additional alt text tag on each individual traffic light, in future for the benefit any colour blind folk?

[#3]

Great feedback. Thanks.

[#4]

The traffic lights should have been tagged and it is in the html... I'll investigate why this hasn't worked and get it fixed as soon as possible. Thanks for the feedback.

[#5]

The ALT attribute is present on the images already. You aren't using Firefox by any chance are you?

[#6]

The browser which is apparently used by the majority of users of this site: http://community.plus.net/forum/index.php?topic=181.0 Whatever you do should work for FF users.

[#7]

Sorry for the delayed reply but yes I am using a Firefox browser. I was unaware that FF does not interpret alt tags! Never mind, maybe another more effective signal or indicator could be selected?

[#8]

No mention of Usenet? But it went through a radical change in 2007 didn't it? You outsourced it? It must have taken quite a bit of management time to negotiate the deal and techy time to implement it. Has it worked? Have usenet-related issues settled down to a lower rate than before the migration?

[#9]

Firefox does interpret alt attributes, but quite correctly it understands the difference between alt and title. The alt attribute is used if an image is not being displayed and the title attribute will be used for tooltips. It is good practice to provide both and then both IE and firefox will be happy.

[#10]

I was looking forward to BT Fusion and thought that it would have come a little bit sooner, now that the partnership with BT has been made.

[#11]

I was looking into BT Vision and was seriously considering whether to jump to BT Broadband so that I could access this service. It just so happened that the loyalty offer appeared in my Inbox, added with that the superb reliability and performance I've had over the years from PlusNet I decided to stay. I'm hoping that, with the tie-up between PlusNet and BT that the Vision product is introduced within the not-too-distant future.

[#12]

I too am waiting eagerly (and a little impatiently) for the IPTV offering. Virgin Media is looking increasingly tempting. Loyalty has it's limits!

[#13]

Well I can assume that this update is now 12 months old, and we should be due a 2008 update, is there any news re the Home Hub? I have a BT Home Hub and think it’s a great bit kit, but in its standard format it is locked to BT Broadband, I have managed to update the firmware so that I can use it with my Plus.Net account but in doing so I have lost all the nice VoIP & Hub Phone functionality. Hopefully they’ll be releasing this soon, when they do will Plus.NET provide a firmware update to allow existing owners to upgrade their hubs so they can be used with Plus.Net (even if the update is locked to either Plus.Net or BT) ?