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Welcome to the latest edition of Plus, the
PlusNet newsletter.
It's the first newsletter of 2008. I've only just got used to writing that, 2008, and a new year really gets you thinking about how fast the online world changes. This time last year Microsoft Vista had just arrived, hardly any of us had Facebook accounts and we didn't even have a Community Site! Who knows what 2008 will bring? It's sure to be an exciting year.
Carol Axe
(Customer Support Manager and Plus Editor)
Contents
- New year, new awards?
- Postini: The story so far
- Are you ready for Internet Explorer 7?
- The future of broadband
- My Referrals improvements
- The Community site is changing
- Other news
1. New year, new awards?
I’m delighted to announce that we’ve started 2008 the way we finished
2007 by being nominated for 3 more awards! We’ve made the final shortlists
for Best Consumer ISP, Best Business ISP and Best Business Broadband at
the annual ISPA awards.
The Internet Service Providers Association Awards have been running
since 1999 and reward the best of the Internet industry and celebrate
innovation and best practice. This year the awards are taking place in
March and we’re understandably excited to have been short-listed for 3 of
the top awards.
You can read more about the awards and find out who we’re competing
against in each of the categories on our Community
site blog.
Top
2. Postini: The story so far
You may recall back in November we announced our partnership with email
security experts Postini. We've steadily been migrating customers across
to the new anti-spam platform and we now have just under three quarters of
our customers with their email being filtered by the new Postini
systems.
Don't worry if you've not been moved to the new platform yet, we hope
to move the rest of our customers next week so you'll soon notice a
reduction in the amount of spam you receive.
Feedback has been
largely positive and with the help of our customers we've been working
hard to iron out some of the teething problems.
Last week we made
some improvements to the spam filtering rules to increase the
effectiveness of the new system even further and are confident that all
our customers will see the benefits of the Postini partnership.
We recently published an up to date overview of the migration to
Postini and our future plans for the platform over on our Community
Site blog.
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3. Are you ready for Internet Explorer 7?
Since the start of December 75% of customers who visited the PlusNet
website did so using Internet Explorer. Just over a third of these were
using Internet Explorer 6. If you are one of these people then things are
about to change!
On the 12th February Microsoft will force all automatic Windows updates
to download Internet Explorer 7 and overwrite version 6. So, the first
time you go online after this date things may appear slightly
different.
Internet Explorer 7 will offer additional features and increased
security but it may take a bit of time to get used to the new layout and
the differences with the previous version.
Don’t panic, we’ve written an
article to highlight the main changes for you and explained some of
the new features so that you can start confidently using the new version
as early as possible.
The news of this upgrade is being greeted with huge celebrations by
some people, including one particular PlusNet web designer, who was so
excited he just had to tell the world about it over on our
Community site.
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4. The future of broadband
The internet has changed massively over the years and shows no sign of slowing down any time soon. Early text only websites have been replaced by websites containing flash animation, streaming images and highly interactive content.
New applications such as the BBC iPlayer, Channel 4 On-Demand and Apple TV have helped contribute to a surge in internet usage. Since the launch of the BBC iPlayer on Christmas Day we’ve noticed a significant increase in streaming usage across our network. Have a look a this blog for more information about the initial impact of the iPlayer.
The increase in these bandwidth hungry applications has led to numerous debates over how Internet providers can manage a network without raising the costs for customers.
Have a look at this article on our Community site and let us know what you think about the future of broadband.
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5. My Referrals improvements
For all of you who enjoy the benefits of our My Referrals programme, we
thought you'd like to know about some recent improvements that we've
made. You can now see the usernames of the people you've referred,
allowing you to monitor your referrals more closely than ever before.
You'll also be able to see when each of your referred accounts was
activated, when you last received a discount and the number of discounts
you have received for each account. I hope that these updates will
make the My Referrals process much smoother for you. Check out the My
Referrals section of your Member Centre to see the changes that we’ve
made.
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6. The Community site is changing
In the next week we hope to launch our redesigned
Community site. Our developers have been working hard over the past
few weeks to improve the usability and visual appeal of the Community
site. Feedback from our customers has been invaluable during this process.
Just like the current version of the Community site, the new
design will feature news, blogs, forums and polls and will be a great
place to interact with fellow customers and PlusNet staff alike. If
you want to join in forum discussions or post your comments on blogs and
news articles then please register for a free Community
site account.
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7. Other news
Also in the last 4 weeks:
I'd like to apologise to any customers who may have experienced issues
in the past couple of weeks with their PlusNet hosted websites. All of
these issues have since been resolved and I'd like to thank all of our
customers for their patience throughout.
Our latest customer
satisfaction scores reveal that we ended 2007 with our highest overall
satisfaction score to date. The survey showed that 65.5% of customers were
either ‘very satisfied’ or ‘extremely satisfied’ with the service they
received. Read more about this on our Customer Support blog.
We’ve all been marvelling at the newest member of the Apple family, the
MacBook Air, and wondering just how they manage to make things so
shiny and so very pretty.
We’ve also given away yet another year’s free broadband to one of our
lucky customers who filled in our Rate My Service survey. We’ll be doing
this every month, so for your chance to win, please take 5 minutes to complete
the survey.
Next month we’ll be announcing our Plans for 2008 so be sure to keep an
eye out to learn more about what you can expect to see from PlusNet over
the next 12 months. If you haven't already done so, register
your new Community site username and you can join in with the latest
debates and conversation on the Community site forums.
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Want to talk to us about anything in this newsletter? Then visit our Discussion Forums.
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