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Broadband Network Capacity (285660) - UPDATE
Broadband Network Capacity
Posted on: Wednesday 21 October 2009, 16:06
This is an update to the announcement we made last week about performance problems and speed issues for some customers during peak times when the network is busy.
We are still aware that there are a number of customers are reporting slower than expected speeds during the late afternoon and early evenings, and we would like to apologise to those still experiencing difficulties.
We have experienced a number of problems recently, most notably issues concerning network balance and a problem that affected our traffic management switches last week. These issues have been further compounded and made harder to identify due to the growth in traffic on the network following Microsoft's recently released security updates - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8302286.stm
We lit another segment of central capacity on Monday, however the benefits of this have been somewhat eclipsed by the fact that a problem on the network yesterday evening resulted in close to 30,000 customers being briefly disconnected from the Internet. This is very unfortunate as it has resulted in further imbalance across our broadband platform which will not be helping the current situation - http://www.plus.net/support/service/problems/problem.php?intProblemId=58763
We have more central bandwidth scheduled to be lit over the coming weeks and we're continuing to monitor the network in case we've overlooked anything else that may be contributing to these problems.
Customers on certain account types will continue to see slower speeds than they are used to during peak times, particularly traffic that falls into our download sites/servers classification or traffic that is rate limited during peak hours - http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/quality_broadband/download_servers.shtml
http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/quality_broadband/speed.shtml
Customers on our Broadband Pro product are less likely to notice these problems as all of their Internet traffic is prioritised regardless as to the time of day.
Service Status remains at 'Amber' and the network is still in 'Plan B' operation - http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/quality_broadband/load.shtml
Sorry for the continued inconvenience, and thanks for your patience whilst we work to resolve these issues.
Kind Regards,
Bob Pullen
Customer Support
We are still aware that there are a number of customers are reporting slower than expected speeds during the late afternoon and early evenings, and we would like to apologise to those still experiencing difficulties.
We have experienced a number of problems recently, most notably issues concerning network balance and a problem that affected our traffic management switches last week. These issues have been further compounded and made harder to identify due to the growth in traffic on the network following Microsoft's recently released security updates - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/8302286.stm
We lit another segment of central capacity on Monday, however the benefits of this have been somewhat eclipsed by the fact that a problem on the network yesterday evening resulted in close to 30,000 customers being briefly disconnected from the Internet. This is very unfortunate as it has resulted in further imbalance across our broadband platform which will not be helping the current situation - http://www.plus.net/support/service/problems/problem.php?intProblemId=58763
We have more central bandwidth scheduled to be lit over the coming weeks and we're continuing to monitor the network in case we've overlooked anything else that may be contributing to these problems.
Customers on certain account types will continue to see slower speeds than they are used to during peak times, particularly traffic that falls into our download sites/servers classification or traffic that is rate limited during peak hours - http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/quality_broadband/download_servers.shtml
http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/quality_broadband/speed.shtml
Customers on our Broadband Pro product are less likely to notice these problems as all of their Internet traffic is prioritised regardless as to the time of day.
Service Status remains at 'Amber' and the network is still in 'Plan B' operation - http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/quality_broadband/load.shtml
Sorry for the continued inconvenience, and thanks for your patience whilst we work to resolve these issues.
Kind Regards,
Bob Pullen
Customer Support