This is an update to last week's post about the ongoing speed and performance problems some of our customers continue to suffer, especially during the evenings when the network is at its busiest.

Last Friday the network was performing notably better following some changes our engineers had made earlier in the week. Unfortunately there has been a degradation in performance since then, particularly due to some unforeseen problems we encountered over the weekend and towards the start of this week.

We mentioned in the last announcement that we expected the network to be very busy last Sunday and Monday evening - http://usertools.plus.net/status/archive/1258133233.htm
Due to this, and because of some of the problems that we're yet to fix, we switched into a 'Plan B' network configuration - http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/quality_broadband/load.shtml

The network was busy on Sunday but was actually a lot quieter than we anticipated. Despite this we had a problem late Saturday afternoon that caused all customers connected to pcl-ag03 to be disconnected from the Internet. Whilst these customers were able to reconnect almost immediately, anybody connecting back on to the same gateway would not have been able to browse web pages due to data transfer problems. We didn't become fully aware of this problem until Sunday afternoon at which point we took the decision to perform the following work which would have resulted in more disconnections - http://usertools.plus.net/status/archive/1258297848.htm
Unfortunately, despite our efforts, this only fixed things for some customers and by early Monday morning we were still receiving reports of problems. At this point we stopped any more customers from connecting to the broken gateway and carried out a software update - this fully resolved the problem but resulted in further disconnections for anybody connected to pcl-ag03 - http://usertools.plus.net/status/archive/1258384040.htm
pcl-ag03 is now fully working and is being brought back into balance with the rest of the network.

On Monday afternoon a slightly different problem was identified with another gateway on the network (pcl-ag02). No customers were disconnected this time round and there weren't any data transfer problems, however the gateway stopped accepting any new sessions causing it to drop out of balance as customers began to disconnect or 'churn' from it. We've put a temporary fix in place this afternoon and are continuing to work with our hardware vendor to identify the underlying cause.

Because of the above problems and the imbalance of the network, we remained in 'Plan B' operation last night and will continue to do so until further notice. This *will* result in degraded performance but should ensure that the quality of web browsing is not significantly affected. Some streaming services may be impacted by this dependent on the account type you are subscribed to.

We are aware that there are customers still reporting problems where web pages and other Internet resources fail to connect but are immediately accessible seconds later after trying again. We're still of the opinion that this is due to congestion on some of our core network links, and we have engineers en route to London to recable and reconfigure parts of the network. We will post further details about these changes nearer the time.

Thanks once more for your patience and sorry about the continued inconvenience, we'll provide another update before the end of the week.

Kind Regards,

Bob Pullen
Customer Support