Plusnet

Plusnet Plc

Type	Division of BT
Industry	Internet, VoIP, Telephony
Founded	1997 (as Plusnet Technologies Ltd)
Headquarters	Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England
Key people	Jamie Ford, Chief Executive Richard Fletcher, Chief Operating Officer
Products	Internet Services & Landline Telephone Services
Website	http://www.plus.net

Plusnet is an Internet Service Provider (ISP) based in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England. Plusnet was floated on the Alternative Investment Market in July 2004, making them a Public limited company (Plusnet Plc). It has been owned since 30 January 2007 by BT Group, but operates as a separate business. Plusnet also operates the Metronet brand in the UK.

History

Origins

Plusnet's origins go back to 1 February 1997, when Choice Peripherals, a PC computer-peripherals company launched Force9 Internet. Heavily involved in early Plusnet was founder of Choice Peripherals, Paul Cusack (Chairman), who later went on to create the hardware retailer Ebuyer, and Lee Strafford (Managing Director), who later went on to lead Plusnet through most of its development up to the sale to BT in January 2007.

The original Force9 webpage, from 1998

The first Force9 Internet products followed the dial-up Internet model popularised by Demon Internet (monthly subscription, plus the cost of local phone calls), but offered at a lower cost to subscribers (£7 a month + VAT) and including more value-add features. By October 1997 Force9 had achieved the milestone of 5,000 subscribers, assisted by a marketing partnership with Yorkshire Cable (later to become part of Telewest) in which Yorkshire Cable customers were offered a reduced subscription on a Force9 account. In addition software which used Force9 Internet as the default ISP was supplied with every modem ordered through Choice Peripherals.

Plusnet founded

As the business grew Force9 was split out as a separate operation to Choice Peripherals, with new premises and an umbrella company under which it would operate. This company, Plusnet Technologies Ltd, opened its doors at Internet House, Victoria Quays, Sheffield in November 1997.

Although the company was named Plusnet, the brand was first used for a products by the business sales team at Force9, for leased line and server colocation services to SME's.

In April 1998 Insight Enterprises, an American PC-peripherals company, made a move into the UK market by acquiring Choice Peripherals. However, Insight were principally interested in the online commerce side of the operation and not in the Internet Service Provider, Force9. Because of this, Insight largely left the ISP side of the business operating as it had been, with Lee Strafford remaining in charge of the operation.

This coincided with the April 1999 launch of Force9's version of 'unmetered' dial up which gave 0800 free call rate Internet access during weekend hours. The website was re-branded as F9 in order to promote it.

Brand change

In June 2000 the Force9 brand was changed to Plusnet. This coincided with the introduction of the Surftime dialup Internet products, the first real 24/7 unmetered dial-up service in the UK. Plusnet continued to see month on month growth in the dial-up market and this growth was further augmented with the launch of a 512 kb/sec Broadband Internet service in August 2000. Plusnet launched their first Broadband products on the same day that BT first made them available to the UK market.

Plusnet continued to develop their product set over the next few years as new broadband speeds and technologies became available. The initial Broadband product performed at a speed of 512 kb/sec required a BT Engineer to visit the customer premises to install the service. As time went on the maximum speeds increased to 1 Mbit/s, 2 Mbit/s and, today, up to 8 Mbit/s. In January 2002 Plusnet launched a “Self Install” broadband product that the end user was able to set up themselves without the need for a visit to the premises by a BT Engineer.

Termination of 1100 Customers in February 2001

Plusnet was in the news in February 2001, when 1100 dial-up customers were asked to leave the service after staying connected to an "Unmetered" (but contended) dial-up service for long periods of time. More about this can be found on The Register.^[1]

Introduction of QoS

In November 2004 Plusnet temporarily introduced a dedicated Internet Bandwidth "pipe" specifically for the customers who were aggressive downloaders of data (in order that the heavy downloaders did not impact the Quality of Service on the lines of the vast majority of customers). This became colloquially known amongst some Plusnet customers as the "bad boys pipe". This was withdrawn in 2005 to be replaced with a Sustainable Usage Policy [SUP]. This SUP was introduced in order to prevent the small minority of customers who wanted to download extremely large amounts of data each month during peak hours from causing negative service issues for the remainder of the customers.

Acquisition of MetroNet

In November 2005 Plusnet acquired Parbin Ltd and its consumer ISP "MetroNet" which at that time provided a range of "pay as you go" broadband packages. As part of the Parbin acquisition Plusnet assumed ownership of several other brands; Pay as You Host, INUK and Port995.

Lost Email

On 9 July 2006, Plusnet lost 700 GB of customer email data due to human error. During a routine maintenance upgrade to the email system, an engineer mistakenly reformatted a live disk pack instead of the intended backup disk pack. Plusnet provided updates on their investigation^[2] but did not reveal the size or cause of the problem until 10 July 2007 at 15:39.

Plusnet explained that the engineer responsible had accessed both the live and backup disk packs from a single workstation. The engineer believed his reconfiguration was to the backup storage when it was actually connected to the live email disk pack.^[3]

In the following days, Plusnet did recover some email data and explained that other data may have been lost to corruption during the recovery.

The official Plusnet UserGroup launched an "Email Stability & Resiliency Campaign" to attempt to ensure Plusnet made suitable investments and put in place measures to prevent future issues.

• theregister.co.uk^[4]

Acquisition by BT

On 16 November 2006, it was announced that BT were making an offer for all shares in Plusnet. The BT deal (worth approximately £67m) was declared unconditional on 24 January 2007 (after OFT approval was granted).

On 5 March 2007, shortly after the BT acquisition, Plusnet Chief Executive Lee Strafford and Finance Director Neil Comer were dismissed by BT. Strafford was replaced as CEO by former BT employee Neil Laycock who had been with Plusnet in various senior roles for the 3 years previous.

Webmail security breach

At the beginning of May 2007 Plusnet suffered an attack on its Web based email system which was due to a previously unidentified vulnerability in the third-party software that was being used.

Users accessing the webmail system may have been exposed to a trojan, although no reports of this surfaced. This trojan will have been ineffective on a fully patched Windows machine running regularly updated anti-virus software, or on non-Windows machines.

A list of email addresses was harvested from the webmail platform and put into use by one or more third parties to send spam. These addresses included the user's own webmail address, as well as email addresses used previously and entries in the online address book.

Users who connected to the specific webmail server that was attacked may have had their login details skimmed, although the purpose of the attack seems to have been simply to harvest email addresses.

A full report of the Webmail attack incident is available at community.plus.net^[5]

Products, technology and services

Plusnet currently provide broadband and dial-up Internet solutions to residential and business customers. They also provide landline telephone solutions to the same customers.

Marketing

Plusnet's growth strategy is centred on their customer community recommending people within their social circle to Plusnet. In the 10 years of its existence Plusnet has showed year on year growth in customer numbers, significantly attributable to existing customer referrals. By 2007 30% of Plusnet's new customers joined Plusnet as a result of a referral. In order to incentivise customer referrals Plusnet pay the referring customer a recurring monthly fee for as long as the referred customer stays with Plusnet. This can prove extremely lucrative to those customers with large social networks. Plusnet's reliance on this strategy can have negative effects whenever the business suffers service problems.

Network capacity

Plusnet were one of the first ISPs in the UK to use Network Quality of Service (QoS) techniques in order to control the finite data bandwidth available to them at peak times. This move was a reaction to the cost of bandwidth, £210 per Mbit/s per month in November 2006 for ISPs using the BT Wholesale network. Critics have suggested that the decision to employ QoS on the network was driven by Plusnet's focus on delivering to tight profit targets dictated by investors during the time when they were a PLC.

In 2007 there have been an additional 930 Mb/sec of data bandwidth made available. This was achieved by adding 6 BT IPStream segments to the network. This aggressive ramp-up in network capacity coincided with the acquisition of Plusnet by BT.

This additional capacity has brought the Plusnet total Broadband network capacity to 22 155 Mbit/s BT Central segments. This is delivered over 5 full 622 Mbit/s BT Centrals (4 x 155 Mb/sec in each BT Central) and 2 BT Centrals with one segment of 155 Mb/sec active in each. This services a total of just over 200,000 customers at October 2007.

This total data bandwidth figure is only slightly higher than Plusnet’s capacity in January 2005, before Plusnet used Network Quality of Service, when they had a total of 17 segments (10 155 Mbit/s Centrals and 7 segments delivered over 2 622 Mbit/s pipes) and 100,000 customers. At that time, there was an imbalance on their network as a result of issues that are caused from using a mixture of pipes. In February 2005 they reduced to a total of 16 segments delivered over 5 622 Mbit/s pipes (622's are slightly more efficient than 155 Meg segments, so this allowed for a similar amount of throughput).

In August 2005, Plusnet were forced through contractual obligation to upgrade to 17 segments and in January 2006 they moved to 18 segments. Plusnet’s acquisition of Parbin Ltd in November 2005 with 16,000 customers and 3 x 155 Mbit/s segments gave Plusnet a total of 21 segments. However, Plusnet absorbed all of these new customers and decommissioned the 3 segments bringing them back to 18 segments. This was further reduced by 2 segments bringing it to 16 in total at around the same time as nearly 20,000 customers were moved to the Tiscali LLU network in July 2006.

There is controversy that the last 2 segments should not have been removed. Particularly as at that time Plusnet increased allowances on all the residential packages. When this contradiction was exposed in December 2006 Plusnet defended their actions but the explanation given was not positively received by the community at the time.

Plusnet reported that the slowdown in the increase of capacity from January 2005 was due to two major reasons. The introduction of their lower cost, lower capacity allowance, broadband product; which many existing customers moved to, and the introduction of Network Quality of Service and the general network management policy to combat the spiralling usage of a small portion (Around 1%) of the customer base. However, it was not fully explained how Plusnet expected to deliver the performance of their broadband packages to 180,000 customers on the same capacity as they had when they only had 100,000 customers.

Usage restrictions

Plusnet have, on a number of occasions, redefined their product usage guidelines in order to reflect changes in overall customer usage or in the costs they incur from their suppliers. This has resulted in customers being asked to restrict their usage, upgrade to a different product, or leave the company entirely. This practice has become common within the ISP market in the UK and is generally accepted, however Plusnet have sometimes made these changes without warning or notice to their customers. Plusnet have argued that the changes made didn't require any notice to be given because they don't consider them to form part of the legal contract with the consumer.

Plusnet is one of the few UK ISPs to publish a full breakdown of its wholesale costs, as part of the Plusnet Broadband Blueprint document^[6]

Deep Packet Inspection and Bandwidth Management

Plusnet make heavy use of traffic prioritisation to try to give good quality of service, presumably to help them provide a competitive product.

Plusnet acknowledge on their website^[7] how Network Quality of Service impacts individual protocols and as a result what experience they expect the end-user to receive. This broadband experience is subject to periodic changes without notice in order to preserve the quality of network performance for the protocols that demand extremely low latency. Customers are notified of changes by checking Plusnet's website or RSS feed. It has been suggested by some members of the community that Plusnet have tried to "hide" some of the changes to the Quality of Service quotas on their network, however Plusnet have always maintained that the information is available to all of their customers via their website. These changes have been openly discussed in the online Plusnet community and the Plusnet Usergroup, although the participants in these forums represent a minority of Plusnet’s total customer base.

The use of Arbor Networks equipment to perform 'traffic fingerprinting' using deep packet inspection and Juniper ERX switches to perform protocol shaping has seen a situation where all protocols, including encrypted P2P traffic are identified and managed on their network.

Plusnet's position is that this prioritisation is in place to ensure time-critical applications like VoIP, Gaming, Browsing and Video Streaming (from sites like YouTube) are prioritised above applications that would otherwise swamp their available network capacity to the detriment of other customer's broadband experience. File sharing P2P applications and Binary Usenet are the most heavily managed protocols on Plusnet's network, and are collectively treated as low priority on most of their consumer products.

The topic of Network Quality of Service is a constant discussion point within the Plusnet community. Some end-users consider it a highly punitive restriction on their ability to have unrestricted control of their Broadband experience, whilst Plusnet's stance is that it is a positive thing in order to maintain the quality of each customer’s Broadband Experience on the demanding protocols as well as enabling the company to keep their costs under control.

Misidentification of traffic

Deliberate traffic shaping is deployed on the Plusnet network in order to ensure Quality of Service. Mistakes when this system was first implemented resulted in misclassification of some protocols, which made certain applications unusable at peak times. This was improved when the classification of unidentified traffic was raised in priority. Non-standard applications still remain susceptible to misclassification (e.g. running SSH on a non standard port other than 4500 or 10000 which are set aside by Plusnet for this purpose).

Continual improvements in protocol identification along with a significant increase in available bandwidth mean that today the implementation is generally considered to be working successfully. This blog article by Dave Tomlinson explains in more detail how Plusnet manage traffic identification and make updates to their systems.^[8]

Plusnet's Polish Language Website

In June 2007 Plusnet launched a Polish version^[9] of its UK Website in order to service the growing Polish community in the UK. This idea was suggested by a Polish Plusnet employee and a member of their family was hired into the Customer Support Centre to provide telephone support. Plusnet has a large number of Polish employees at the UK headquarters and all language translation work was performed in-house. This has since been removed following a product and website refresh.

Virtual ISPs

Plusnet operates, and have operated, a number of "Virtual ISP" brands, both for its own company, and for others. These alternative brands use the existing Plusnet Network and Software infrastructure. Some of these "Virtual ISP" brands include:

Still in service

• Metronet^[10] - A brand acquired as part of the Parbin acquisition^[11] in 2005.
• BT Internet Teleworker^[12] - BT Global Services utilises Plusnet's Workplace platform within its Teleworker product, to deliver a remote broadband access solution for its major corporate customers

No longer in service

• Force9 - The original ISP brand used residentially by Plusnet - now merged into Plusnet as of September 2007
• www.plus.net.uk - Plusnet brand catering for business customers - now merged into Plusnet
• Free-Online (FoL) - merged into Plusnet September 2007
• Charity Days - A brand created for Donate As You Surf Ltd, which donates money to charity. This business was purchased outright by Plusnet in 2006. Now discontinued.
• Your Ideal - A brand created for Lloyds TSB
• Dabs Online (Dabsol) - vISP created for computer retailer, Dabs. Ironically now owned by BT.

IPv6 support

Plusnet do not yet provide IPv6 connectivity to its customers, but are currently working on rolling this out on their network. They ran a small trial with real end-users for World IPv6 Day in June 2011, with both their website and broadband customers on IPv6 on that day.^[13]

Awards

Plusnet have won the following awards:

2011

• uSwitch.com Best Overall Customer Satisfaction
• uSwitch.com Most Likely To Be Recommended
• uSwitch.com Best Customer Service
• uSwitch.com Best Quality of Connection

2010

• ISPA Best Customer Service
• uSwitch.com Best Technical Support
• uSwitch.com Runner-up Overall Customer Satisfaction

2009

• uSwitch.com Best Quality of Connection
• uSwitch.com Runner-up in Overall Customer Satisfaction
• Top 10 Broadband Awards Best Value Home Broadband^[14]

2008

• Best Consumer ISP - ISPA Awards 2008
• uSwitch.com Broadband Customer Satisfaction Survey March 2008 - Number one in 9 out of 11 categories:
  1. Best Overall Customer Satisfaction
  2. Best for Ease of Use
  3. Best for Setup Support
  4. Best for Speed Satisfaction
  5. Best for Quality of Connection
  6. Best Customer Service
  7. Best Technical Support
  8. Joint Best Value for Money
  9. Most Likely to be Recommended

2007

• Computer Shopper Best Broadband Supplier 2007
• Custom PC magazine 'Best Internet Service Provider 2007'
• uSwitch.com Broadband Customer Satisfaction Survey Overall Winner May 2007
• uSwitch.com Broadband Customer Satisfaction Survey Information Quality During Sign-up Winner May 2007
• uSwitch.com Broadband Customer Satisfaction Survey Supplier Most likely to be recommended Joint Winner May 2007
• Macworld Magazine - Best Mac-Friendly ISP nominee 2007
• uSwitch.com Broadband Customer Satisfaction Highest Overall Customer Satisfaction

2006

• Comms Channel Awards 2006 - Internet Service Provider of the Year - Finalist
• PC Advisor 2006 - Best for Customer Service - Customer Award

2005

• PC Pro Awards 2005 - Highly Commended ISP Award

2004

• Sheffield Business Awards - Information and Communications Technology Award
• Future UK Internet Awards - Best Consumer ISP & Customer Service Award

2003

• Internet Magazine - Best ISP on the Planet
• PC Pro Magazine - "Best Broadband ISP"
• Sunday Times Buyer's Guide 4 Stars

Community involvement

Plusnet are an active player in the UK's web community, playing an active role in web community events around the UK, especially in the north of England. Events like OpenCoffee and Geekup^[15] often see a Plusnet presence. Plusnet also work with local universities on graduate recruitment, internships and multimedia projects. In June 2005 Plusnet became the official shirt sponsors of Sheffield Wednesday, of the Football League Championship. The original deal ran for 2 years up to the end of the 2006–07 season. In November 2006 it was announced that the sponsorship would be extended to the end of the 2008–09 season.

References

1. ^ Theregister.co.uk
2. ^ Portal.plus.net
3. ^ Usertools.plus.net
4. ^ TheRegister reporting loss of 700gb of email
5. ^ Community.plus.net
6. ^ Plus.net
7. ^ Plus.net
8. ^ Community.plus.net
9. ^ Plus.net
10. ^ Metronet.co.uk
11. ^ Theregister.co.uk
12. ^ Bttelworker.com
13. ^ Community.plus.net
14. ^ Plus.net awards
15. ^ Geekup.org

External links

• Plusnet homepage
• Official Plusnet Usergroup
• Plusnet forum on thinkbroadband.com