I'm on XL [20mb] & getting 2mb UP?

[zag]

What's going on? Getting 2mb up atm....?
Not complaining

[Ignitionnet]

Yes - they are trialling 20/2 and 10/1 in addition to 50/5 and 50/10.

The upgrades are, 100%, going to be for everyone when they happen.

Enjoy!

[Moldova]

I love the way they forget to tell the staff about these trials and you have to read about them on a forum.

[bopdude]

Originally Posted by Moldova

I love the way they forget to tell the staff about these trials and you have to read about them on a forum.

It's great, ain't it

=/ goes to do a speedtest

[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by Moldova

I love the way they forget to tell the staff about these trials and you have to read about them on a forum.

These trials aren't really relevant to 1st / 2nd line technical support so no need to mention it to you guys really. Trials team will be monitoring the modems on the trials and will back the changes out if there are problems

---------- Post added at 08:48 ---------- Previous post was at 08:46 ----------

Originally Posted by bopdude

It's great, ain't it

=/ goes to do a speedtest

Dream on I'm afraid, still a very narrow scope to the trials at present, Huddersfield and Coventry.

[Moldova]

Originally Posted by Broadbandings

These trials aren't really relevant to 1st / 2nd line technical support so no need to mention it to you guys really. Trials team will be monitoring the modems on the trials and will back the changes out if there are problems

---------- Post added at 08:48 ---------- Previous post was at 08:46 ----------



Dream on I'm afraid, still a very narrow scope to the trials at present, Huddersfield and Coventry.

It just looks odd when a customer rings in and no one has any idea what they are on about.

[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by Moldova

It just looks odd when a customer rings in and no one has any idea what they are on about.

On the other hand it's not really anything to do with supporting the customer bar a fault which trials should pick up on from their own monitoring..

If they are calling in because their service is faster than usual they probably need to consider finding a hobby or better yet a pet as they obviously struggle to find company with their own species

[Sephiroth]

Originally Posted by Broadbandings

On the other hand it's not really anything to do with supporting the customer bar a fault which trials should pick up on from their own monitoring..

If they are calling in because their service is faster than usual they probably need to consider finding a hobby or better yet a pet as they obviously struggle to find company with their own species

For once, I think you're wrong.

First and second line support should be given service bulletins to advise where trials are happening, the scope of those trials and any notes associated with servicing support questions. That's plain old good practice which would be byond VM and it's renowned quality director who publicly said a year ago that VM's "fundamentally broken" processes would be fixed by the whiz-bank Six-Sigma quality system!

[Ignitionnet]

The scope of current and upcoming trials is company confidential and technical support most certainly cannot be trusted to keep this to themselves, it'd be on The Register before the end of the day. They are necessarily told what they need to be told to perform their job and no more.

It's also none of the customers' business if trials are running unless they've agreed to sign NDAs for the same confidentiality reasons.

If a customer is part of a trial they are flagged as such and their issues can be directed to the trial team. As I also said the trial team monitor their triallists and will roll back loss of service.

Being totally open with staff about upcoming events may work in a small company or even a larger one where everyone is of a certain grade but for somewhere like Virgin which will have a number of employees who couldn't care less about keeping information to themselves it's not feasible.

You may think I'm wrong all you want but regrettably that is how mass market ISPs have to roll. Tell technical support and you know beyond any shadow of a doubt you just told the whole world what you're up to.

Good practise is fine though it's not such good practise when you're giving the competition an open door into what your plans are for the next several months so that they can pre-empt you. What you suggest is an ideal but not even close to realistic.

[Sephiroth]

Originally Posted by Broadbandings

The scope of current and upcoming trials is company confidential and technical support most certainly cannot be trusted to keep this to themselves, it'd be on The Register before the end of the day. They are necessarily told what they need to be told to perform their job and no more.

It's also none of the customers' business if trials are running unless they've agreed to sign NDAs for the same confidentiality reasons.

If a customer is part of a trial they are flagged as such and their issues can be directed to the trial team. As I also said the trial team monitor their triallists and will roll back loss of service.

Being totally open with staff about upcoming events may work in a small company or even a larger one where everyone is of a certain grade but for somewhere like Virgin which will have a number of employees who couldn't care less about keeping information to themselves it's not feasible.

You may think I'm wrong all you want but regrettably that is how mass market ISPs have to roll. Tell technical support and you know beyond any shadow of a doubt you just told the whole world what you're up to.

Good practise is fine though it's not such good practise when you're giving the competition an open door into what your plans are for the next several months so that they can pre-empt you. What you suggest is an ideal but not even close to realistic.

Utter tripe! Good practice is necessary. It's nonsense to go on about confidentiality because the forums tell all the stories anyway.

[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by Sephiroth

Utter tripe! Good practice is necessary. It's nonsense to go on about confidentiality because the forums tell all the stories anyway.

Whatever Seph. Try working for a large ISP and you may get some grasp of this issue. Forums tell a story of what is being done at the moment, 'good practise' as you want it would give away what is being done months in advance, how, where and why.

Please get through your head this is a large consumer ISP not some small enterprise grade business where one can control everything and have a high degree of confidence in the ability to keep things confidential. Even my own employer does not announce that much to its' staff too far in advance, that's why we have a trials team, to look after trials. I am not officially privvy to what they do because it's none of my business. If a customer contacts us with an issue on a trial I pass it to the trials team.

Sorry to bring the real world into pontification over 'process'. Commercially confidential upcoming products and trials are need to know, and 1st line tech support doesn't, simples.

[Kymmy]

Do I have to start banging heads together???

My own opinion is that if there is any chance that a customer on 20/2 or 10/1 will be ringing cs or ts then they should be informed, if not then the customer should be informed of the trial and given a specific support number..

[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by Kymmy

Do I have to start banging heads together???

My own opinion is that if there is any chance that a customer on 20/2 or 10/1 will be ringing cs or ts then they should be informed, if not then the customer should be informed of the trial and given a specific support number..

There have never been complaints in the past on this issue, I am not sure why it would suddenly kick off now.

Customers who have been migrated to DOCSIS 2 upstreams will be having their nodes especially monitored by the trials teams, and will likely also be on ASM / Advanced Spectrum Management ensuring that they drop to DOCSIS 1 profiles to avoid problems in case of issues with the nodes.

Customers were not informed and tech support were not informed when nodes were migrated to 256QAM, tech support were not informed when downstream uplifts were trialled using these 256QAM nodes, tech support were not informed when 16QAM upstream reconfiguration happened so I am unsure of the value in confusing tech support, as you just know they'll start looking for issues that aren't there, and confusing customers even ignoring the confidentiality issues.

The trial is on such a small area there's really no point. When it starts going live tech support will be told.

In every industry trials are rarely communicated fully through the operational infrastructure unless that infrastructure is very small. Until trials become a larger market it's unnecessary and can cause far more issues with the 99.5% who aren't on the trial than it might resolve with the 0.5% who are.

[Kymmy]

Nobody is complaining, I'm certainly not, but how can VM expect to perform a trial without getting proper feedback, as I said at very least I would have expected the trialists to have been informed and given a point of contact

[Ignitionnet]

Originally Posted by Kymmy

Nobody is complaining, I'm certainly not, but how can VM expect to perform a trial without getting proper feedback, as I said at very least I would have expected the trialists to have been informed and given a point of contact

The trial isn't there for customer feedback, it's there to get feedback on network performance 'in the field' along with how it copes with the extra load from uplifting the customers. Customer feedback is derived from closed trials where customers have agreed an NDA such as the ongoing trials in and around Ashford.

You'll note that a fair few triallists were on the Samknows performance trial so feedback would have been obtained from there on those guys.

The 'nobody is complaining' bit referred to that, as far as we're aware, there was no mass of calls into tech support from people complaining that their services had speeded up on trials or that they were having major issues after being upgraded on a trial.