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 have remained in a 'Plan A' configuration since Friday evening and have been monitoring network performance and customer feedback closely - http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/quality_broadband/load.shtml

Unfortunately on Sunday evening we suffered a significant drop in subscribers from two our our 622Mbps central pipes. This left the network significantly out of balance on Sunday/Monday however after a period of maintenance work on Monday night, things are now looking much better. We did suffer a minor drop again last night due to a BT Wholesale outage however this should only have a negligible effect on things as we've been able to bring things back into balance throughout today.

Since the last update we have made a number of other changes aimed at improving the current situation.

Firstly, we noticed that the extra capacity we activated last week was not allowing connections from all of our customers, this has since been remedied and is no longer an issue.

We have also reviewed the traffic weightings on that we used to prioritise traffic and last night at around 9.00pm made some changes that should improve the performance of high priority activities like web browsing when the network is busy.

Most notably, we have managed to set-up some additional monitoring that has identified a potential issue with the amount of traffic being pushed between some of our core network interfaces. We have suspicions that this is causing packet loss which is leading to the gaming and intermittent DNS problems that have been reported by some customers in our discussion forums. We are currently discussing how best to resolve this issue so that we can determine whether or not it is contributing to the overall problem.

A change that we made to another of our network interfaces late this afternoon unfortunately did not result in any noticeable improvement and has since been rolled back.

We are continuing to migrate some of our ADSL customers across to BT Wholesale's '21CN' network. Whilst this network is commonly associated with ADSL2+ (Up to 20Mbps), it also supports ADSL 1 technology and has more spare capacity at the moment when compared to our 20CN platform. We intend on increasing the capacity available on our 21CN network at some point next week.

Until Service Status returns to 'Green' some customers may continue to experience -

* Very intermittent 'page can't be displayed' errors trying to browse to certain websites or servers, which then seem to work fine seconds/minutes later.
* Slower speedtest results, especially when comparing the results across different gateways.
* Slower download speeds from download sites/servers like Akamai & Limelight Networks - http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/quality_broadband/download_servers.shtml
* Lower speeds than those advertised on our website for lower priority Internet activites like Peer to Peer and binary Usenet - http://www.plus.net/support/broadband/quality_broadband/speed.shtml
* Higher than normal latency when gaming.

We would like to say sorry to those who continue to be affected by these problems and will provide another update before the end of the week.

Kind Regards,

Bob Pullen
Customer Support